f you already have your Magento eCommerce platform set up or you are planning on building one, you might be aware that the default Magento features do not fulfill all your business needs. Magento is an open-source platform which is why it has extensions to support and extend its functionality. Extensions are necessary for boosting your conversion rate, sales and improving user interface for the ideal customer experience.
Magento Connect is a store that lets you browse and select these extensions for the kind of functionality you are looking for in your online eCommerce store. It contains extensions for automating processes, conversion tools, social media marketing, currency conversion etcetera.
Hence, if you have the question, which best Magento extensions do you need for your online eCommerce store then we have listed down below the 20 best Magento extensions you need for your Magento store that will boost its performance. The extensions are listed in no particular order.
1. Zendesk
If you’re a solopreneur, you can definitely use Zendesk to organize your customer support service cheaply. If you have a small store than you can get customer support service for only $12 a year. A bigger online eCommerce store will still cost you less than hiring a professional at only $59/month. This extension will enable you to organize, control and improve on your customer service considerably.
2. Optimizely
Optimizely is the ideal extension if you want to run A/B tests and monitor areas or metrics of your business like conversion rate, bounce rate etcetera.
The extension comes with a visual editor that allows you to do page testing with just a drag and drop user interface. Moreover, you can also create a temporary page with this extension while you are developing a permanent page.
3. Olark
Out of all the chat support software available on Magento Connect, Olark is ahead in terms of its customization and reporting ability. A chat box software is necessary if you do not want your customers to go through the process of generating tickets for support.
Furthermore, Olark enables you to have a history of your customers stored so you waste less time with questions and straightaway provide your best solution to your customers. One bonus is that Olark easily integrates with Zendesk as well.
4. One Page Checkout
Want to increase your conversion rate? Quit the tiring 4-5 step checkout process and install the One Page Checkout extension. This extension would lower the phenomenon of cart abandonment rate, hence reducing the money spent on attempts to making the customer complete a purchase. Furthermore, the extension can be configured to support various languages and can also be integrated with Paypal. A must have!
5. Nitrogento
It takes just some milliseconds of additional load time that drives away your customer. The Nitrogento extension will boost the performance and speed of your online eCommerce store by enabling page caching. The only con of this extension is a relatively high price, but it is worth it if it converts your customers!
6. Yotpo
As a merchant, you would want there to be a review system on your products for your happy customers. The review system is required for better SEO, improved consumer confidence, review requests via email and other marketing jargons! Yotpo provides all these features of a review system and even those that you did not think of before.
Yotpo team ensures that you achieve your goals with their extension so the reviews are optimized for SEO as much as possible. Perhaps, the best feature of Yotpo is its feature of letting you filter reviews. Of course, this is not meant to be used unethically as it improves customer experience to read the 3-star and 4-star review. This feature is designed to be used to filter out random/false reviews maybe even given by your competitors!
7. Fooman Google Analytics
This extension provides additional features of your Google Analytics setup. Some of the salient features include Adwords tracking of purchases and conversions. It further enables the merchant to analyse how Adwords is performing, and how much clicks are being converted and facilitates in filtering the results by customers as well.
8. Blog
Content is a vital part of any business, and if you want to incorporate that into your online store then there is no better feature than Blog. It is a highly popular extension and is used in majority of the Magento stores worldwide.
The usage is fairly simple, and free too. Even though it is free, the team behind this extension makes sure that this is up to date and provides seamless performance. Hence, blog is one of the best Magento extensions out there when it comes to content marketing.
9. MatrixRate
Managing shipment can be a complex task for start-up eCommerce stores as prices of products vary from each other. For example: shipment charges will vary if a pen needs to be delivered as opposed to a guitar that needs to be delivered at the same location.
This is where MatrixRate comes in. it enables the merchant to vary the shipping cost and allow for factors like weight, quantity and location etcetera. On its back-end, there are tables that have prices for various factors that are applied as soon as the customer enters the location for example. May save you tons of cash!
10. XML Map Creator
This extension is vital if you want to be listed on the Google’s organic search results. It facilitates the creation of XML sitemaps for your online store website. XML sitemaps enable search engines like Google and Bing to study the depth of your site and crawl it effectively. This helps in increase the amount of traffic coming to your website.
11. Magento Customer Attributes Extension
This extension facilitates information gathering about customers. It has the functionality to add custom attributes which can be controlled via admin panel. Other features include filtering, sorting by name, type and attribute etc.
12. SEO Hub
Doing SEO is a not an easy task when you want to drive traffic to your website. SEO Hub is, by far the best SEO extension on Magento Connect. It allows the user to create and manage meta tags, custom URLs, meta title etcetera. It has additional features like notifications, meta data limit etc. Installing this extension will pave your way to Google’s first page and drive traffic to your website.
These are some of the must have and best Magento extensions that will facilitate you in running your online eCommerce store seamlessly. This is, in no way, an exhaustive list of extensions and you can find thousand others on Magento Connect. There are reviews and testimonials attached with each extension to make you decision easier. Do you want to add to this list of best Magento extensions? Comment below, we love to hear what is working for you.