You’ve heard about how great Magento is, and you’re ready to make it your new content management system (CMS.) That’s a great start, but now what? Just having a site set up isn’t enough for most businesses these days, particularly if you’re planning on providing your visitors with an optimal experience when they land on your page. Are you going to have any type of ecommerce with your business? You’ll need a shopping cart. Do you want people to find you when they’re on the search engines? You might want to consider an SEO optimizing tool. In other words, once you’ve established that you’ll be using Magento, you’ve just established the beginning of what can be a very beautiful thing.
Here are a few Magento extensions that we at Optimum Systems Online and our clients use to take our websites to the next level:
- SEO Suite Ultimate. Even the best content writers can always use a little help making the search engines see how awesome their work is. If your focus isn’t on content writing, you’re probably welcoming even more than just a little help. After all, if the search engines aren’t seeing your content, they’re not sending people your way. And if they’re not sending people your way, having a nice website doesn’t really mean much. SEO Suite Ultimate was designed to help you optimize your URL, header, sitemap, and utilize algorithms to help your words and products be recognized by the search engines.
- Add Multiple Products to Cart. Making shopping as easy as possible for your consumers can ultimately lead to more products being purchased. With Add Multiple Products to Cart, your customers can do bulk shopping with the simple click of a button. This extension makes it easy to not only increase the quantity of a single product quickly, but multiple different items can all be selected and added to the cart at once.
- Facebook Connect Social Shopping. Utilize social media for all of its power by giving your friends the ability to talk about your products and company without even leaving your site. This extension links your customers to their friends so they can get opinions and converse about their potential purchases, which drives more attention to your company that your initial suitor.
- Fooman Speedster. The shorter your pages’ load times, the less patience you’re asking your visitors to have. The quicker you can have your pages load, the more likely your audience will be to stick around and see what you have to offer. The Fooman Speedster extension combines and compresses large files like Javascript and CSS files. The result is a load time that is far shorter than without.
- Mouse Over Zoom. One complaint of Magento in the past has been an ineffective zooming capability. The Mouse Over Zoom extension takes away the frustration of not being able to zoom in on items on your pages by providing a picture-in-picture box on the right side of the screen, which provides the zoomed images of the moused-over item.
- Magento Mobile. Of course, what is a website if it can’t be easily read on a mobile devise? The Magento Mobile extension boosts your website to make it more mobile compatable and easier to read on the go.
- Bronto Extension. A favorite of the OSO Web Studio marketing team, the Bronto extension works to drive sales by creating targeted marketing campaign tools. It uses previous and current sales data to recommend products, segments of customers, coupon options, abandoned cart reminders, and more to bring your customers back again-and-again.
- Piwik Ecommerce. As you have read, we are big fans of Piwik, and that means we are huge fans of the Piwik Ecommerce extension for Magento. This extension links your website’s ecommerce data directly with your Piwik account for even more analytical data gold.
Did we miss a few of your favorite Magento extensions? If so, feel free to talk about your faves in the OSO comment section below.
