7 Best Free Magento Extensions

August 25, 2015 by Leah Na'aman

eCommerce stores that use Magento as their platform generally make use of extensions to prepare their online stores to produce even more results.
Here are 7 of the best free Magento Extensions.

Blog – Community Edition by aheadWorks   

Blogging has been proven to be one of the best marketing tactics online. From niche and esoteric to widespread wildfire, blogs have taken overBlog - Community Edition by aheadWorks - Logo.
Today, you will find one in every respectable company website.

Reaching out to your visitors is extremely important and blogging opens a two-way communications line. Write and share insights or updates with an interested public. Learn more about your customers by reading their comments and noticing trends or overlooked problems they discover. This extension is available free of charge for Magento stores.

 

WordPress Integration by FishPig

As the name suggests this extension allows you to collaborate your Magento and WordPress efforts. The features of this extension are very effective:WordPress Integration by FishPig - Logo

  • Requires no core Magento or WordPress file modification
  • Use your Magento theme for your WordPress blog
  • Integrate an existing WordPress blog and keep the same URL’s. Your SEO will not be affected
  • Associate WordPress posts with Magento products
  • Support for WordPress shortcodes and new custom shortcodes only available through this extension
  • 1-Click login to your WordPress Admin from your Magento Admin
  • Create menu’s in the WordPress Admin and add it to the Magento Topmenu

The extension is completely free and includes translations for the following languages: Brazilian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French and German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish.


Enhanced Admin Product Grid by Sweet Tooth

Add features to your product grid and increase your flexibility and options when optimizing your Magento store for a better user experience.

The extension includes:

  • Full Product Search: Allows you to emulate your product searches as if you were a customer and display the results in the products grid. The feature is very helpful when helping a customer find a product.
  • Grid Row Highlighter: Highlight a few rows by dragging your cursor over them while holding CTRL (highlighted rows will be checked off). This applies to all grids (including the catalog grid).Enhanced Admin Product Grid by Sweet Tooth
  • Catalog Grid Thumbnails/Images: Shows product thumbnail images in the catalog product grid in an organized and focused manner.
  • Persistent Catalog Grid Settings: Allows you to set the default page size, default columns to show, default sort etc. The settings you choose will be saved in your Store Configuration.
  • Mass Product Refresh: Loads and saves a multitude of products. This aids in clearing up data inconsistency issues and saves time on the save/load process.
  • Quick Export: exports data by creating a CSV file with all the selected products. The exported file will be sent to your browser.
  • Custom Catalog Product Grid Columns: Gives you the option to select how to view the columns you want to see in the catalog product grid. For example, short description, long description, custom attributes, etc.
  • Product Image Thumbnail Column: You will be able to view product image thumbnails in a tidy column in the catalog grid.
  • Date Created Column: Allows you to show the “date created” value for a product if you desire to do so.

The extension is now open source code and is available on github.com.


Easy Lightbox 2.0 by Templates Master

Allows you to replace the default Magento media block with an engaging lightbox window in order to showcase products in a visually appealing and user friendly way.Easy Lightbox 2.0 by Templates Master

This Magento extension is free and completely customizable free. Change the lightbox window, thumbnail, main image size and configure settings such as overlay fade, resize duration, label image and etc. You can also place a customized image gallery on CMS pages using the Magento widget interface. This allows you to select between image or link as the display mode. In addition the image, title, image preview size and lightbox size options are fully configurable too.

Other Features:

  • No files are replaced and no coding experience needed to install
  • Configurable animation speed
  • The display of product name in the lightbox title in case the image title field is empty
  • Able to translate the text under the picture carousel (“Image X of Y”) in the lightbox window to different languages via configuration
  • Ability to keep the default Magento zoom on the product page if needed

The extension is 100% Open source, doesn’t affect Magento core files and was Developed using the Magento programming guidelines.


SMTP Pro Email by Ashley Schroder

Dubbed as “the best free, open source SMTP solution for Magento”, this extension gives you complete control of custom SMTP server settings for sending Magento emails and includes pre-configuration for popular services such as Gmail, Google Apps, AWS Simple Email Service and SendGrid.

SMTP Pro Email by Ashley SchroderFeatures include:

  • Custom SMTP server support in your Magento store
  • Outbound email logging
  • Debug logging
  • Developer Friendly
  • Handy table of compatible email service providers

For SMTP you can specify authentication methods from None, Login, Plain or CRAM-MD5. You can choose to secure the connection with SSL or TLS, or disable secure connections completely. Both the host and port are configurable.

There are two features you may not find in other, older, SMTP extensions: the extension includes a self test option, which lets you verify your settings are correct and it works with Magento Newsletters.

The extension has been trusted for over 5 years with over 40,000 downloads and is free to use.

 

Google Analytics+ by Fooman

The extension provides additional features and advanced analytics for the default Google Analytics module:Google Analytics+ by Fooman

  • Supports Google Universal Analytics (Classic Analytics are no longer supported)
  • Create a comprehensive sales funnel by tracking every step of the checkout process (including sections retrieved via AJAX during one-page-checkout) – pinpoint precisely where potential customers are ‘dropping off’ during the checkout process.  This way you will be able to generate more sales through improved conversions.
  • enables you to track to a secondary profile
  • Enables you to enter a domain name – useful if you want to combine multiple sites in a single analytics account
  • Filter your reports by customers
  • Track Adwords conversions for purchases
  • Categorise items on transactions
  • Dynamic Remarketing Tags

reCAPTCHA by StudioForty9

Spam and malicious bots are plentiful all over the internet. Bots can be hazardous to any site and are downright disastrous to Ecommerce sites. Spam bots can cause severe performance issues, slowing down sites and many times crashing them.Since user experience is crucial for online shopping, Ecommerce sites are more susceptible to this problem.reCAPTCHA by StudioForty9

This free extension protects your forms (product review, contact us etc) and subsequently secures your user experience funnel as bots cannot pass it and move to the next phase.

With so many free Magento store extensions available, Magento store productivity and usability will no doubt continue to rise.

Is this your first time hearing about these extensions? Do you know better ones? Tell us what you think in the comment section. After you do that, go ahead and click here to sign up for free to Shoppimon to start monitoring your store for any issues or problems that make you lose clients and sales!

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