Twenty Of The Best Magento 2 Extensions (Part 1)
As you may know, here at Media Lounge we love Magento and it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular and used eCommerce web design platforms to date. At the very end of 2015, the latest version. Magento 2 was finally released. Although most online merchants will continue to chug along with Magento 1, more and more are finally deciding to make the switch over to Magento 2. However, the newest version of Magento is still yet to realize its full potential and the amount of available plugins is currently a lot less than the original version. When it comes to free plugins (as let’s be honest, these are the ones we look for first) the options are even thinner which is due to the fact that most of them are connector extensions.
This is why we wanted to share a list of some of our favourite free extensions for Magento 2 which are all developed by certified Magento partners!
Exto Analytics
Running an eCommerce store without any proper analytics in place is basically just a waste of time and money. Your business will require many marketing efforts based on relevant data. If you have the desire to go above and beyond the limited functions of native Magento 2 reporting, you should give Exto Analytics a try. This analytical tool will help you gain valuable insights about your business and choose a much better marketing strategy for your store.
The extensions have three reports: Sales Overview, Sales by Product and Sales by Category with a convenient interface, there is a date range picker which is available in every report so that you can track and compare the performance of your store during different time periods. The Sales by Product report identifies your bestsellers, analyses how certain products are performing, and compares different products by various KPIs.
Other features worth mentioning is a chart in order to visualise the data for every report, a real-time mobile dashboard in order to check on your business anytime, reports are very easy to manage; you can sort report data by any column or turn off/on columns in the report and the last notable feature being that all your previous data collected will be added once Exto Analytics has been installed.
Awesome Blog
A well developed and updated blog helps you to keep in touch with your customers, give them updates on promotions, new products and also does wonders for your SEO rankings. Which is why Awesome Blog made it onto the list and could be an excellent addition to your Magento 2 store.
The extension includes features such as SEO friendly permalinks, it’s easy to import posts and categories from your already existing WordPress blog and your customers are able to quickly find posts they are looking for by using the search widget.
Banners – Free Responsive Banner Slider
The Free Banner extension will provide you with an easy way to add your best sellers or newest arrivals on each and every page of the site. Pretty straightforward and very efficient.
What makes this one so good? The banner images are shown on an attractive slider, you are able to add a banner onto any page of the site, as well as set your own order of the images and give them all a custom and unique title.
This extension proves that it doesn’t have been complicated in order to be good.
Store Locator
A lot of eCommerce store owners use their website to bring customers to their physical store using Store Locator extensions. Adding this extension allows you to place all your stores on a Google Map so clients can easily locate them. Customers are able to search by using their postcode, city or even their geolocation.
What’s great about this extension is that you can add any address, city, country, postcode, link, telephone number, email and even images, while also being able to add directions from the user’s locations to the store (driving, walking, cycling or public transport).
Delete Orders
Magento does not allow you to delete orders with all invoices, shipments, memos and many other related things just in one click. If you have many test orders or old orders, you will have to delete them all with detailed data step by step. The Delete Orders extension allows you clean up your orders a lot faster and more efficiently.
Banner Slider Magento 2
Banner Slider Magento 2 enables your website to display images with a banner slider using 36 different positions and slider effects. The extension allows you to view and also analyse any report on each of your sliders imported so you can effectively adjust them in order to get the very best results.
Brand Extension For Magento 2
The Brand extension allows you to fully create and display professional brand carousel and brand pages. You can place your brand image block anywhere in your store with ease. The extensions are easy to use and to customise and allows you to optimise for SEO purposes and provides you with several layouts to choose from too.
Google Tag Manager
The Google Tag Manager allows you to manage Google Analytics and Adwords all at once instead of having to do them individually. When you add the GTM (Google Tag Manager) code onto your site, the extension will act as a third party and handles all your script tags. GTM remarketing program lets you show your ads to visitors over and over again.
The GTM extension is quick and easy to install, it will simplify the management of Google tags as well as supports dynamic remarketing. It also supports multi-stores as well as multi languages too.
Magento 2 SMTP
The Magento 2 SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) extension provides your store with a configurable host and port. You will have more control over your email customisation and be able to run test sections on your Magento 2 SMTP server. This is to make sure your emails will reach all your customers without going into the spam box.
The extension supports 20+ SMTP service providers and allows you to test if the current email setting is working properly or not. Any emails that you send there will be a log to keep track of what got sent out and when and also you can take a lot more control on customisation and running test sections on Magento 2 SMTP server.
Magento 2 Product List
Magento 2 Product List decreases your customers’ abandon rate by creating a product list of the best selling and latest products. This, in turn, helps your customers quickly find what they are looking for. You have the ability to add in as many rows to your product list as you desire.
So there we have the first half of the best 20 Magento 2 extensions around. Next month we will be carrying on and uncovering the final 10 so you can get the most out of your Magento 2 store. keep your eyes peeled for part two.