10 Free Magento Extensions You Should Add To Your Store

Written by Jon on 21st September 2016

One of Magento’s strengths is the ability to customise and add a variety of extensions to enhance the customer’s shopping experience on your site.  There are thousands of paid and free extensions available on the marketplace but we thought we would pick out some of our favourites.

Today we’re looking at the free options – particularly when you’re just starting out you need to take advantage of every freebie you can get!

So without further ado…

1. Mailchimp for Magento

The latest Mailchimp extension for Magento offers a lot more functionality than previously and provides you a range of marketing automation tools.

New features include product and category follow ups, customer re-engagement, best customers and obviously cart abandonment!

MageMonkey

You can view all automations here.

Developer – Ebizmarts

2.  Matrix Rates

WebShopApps offer a wide range of shipping extensions (and also developed Shipper HQ) but this extension provides you with the ability to offer more flexible shipping options using a CSV upload.  There are a number of methods for configuring the CSV depending on your requirements and full support documentation is provided along with examples.

Matrix Rates - Free Magento Extension

If are looking for more complex algorithmic shipping options you can upgrade to the premium version.

Developer – WebShopApps

3.  Magento/Wordpress Integration

So it is agreed that if you have an ecommerce website, you should have a blog that is regularly updated and provides content that will be informative to your customers.  Search engines like the fact you are updating your website with lots of fresh content and therefore a blog should be part of your content strategy.

WordPress is great for this, however, the need to login into two separate admin panels can be a pain. Fortunately it’s a pain that can be taken away with this extension allowing you to manage your WordPress installation from within your Magento admin panel.

Magento/Wordpress Extension

Developer – FishPig

4.  Banner Slider

Looking for a slider for your homepage?  You could code it or you save yourself the time with this extension.

Do we need to say anymore?

Banner Slider - Free Extension for Magento

Developer – MageStore

5.  Catalog Search Refinement

Magento’s out of the box search functionality isn’t always the best. Typically it will match ‘ANY’ rather than all so search results might not be as accurate as you would hope for.

For example ‘RED SHOES’ would would show all results with the term ‘RED’ (including red trousers, red socks and so on).  This extension changes that ‘ANY’ to ‘ALL’ so all keywords would need to be included for more refined search results.

Catalog Search Refinement - Free Magento Extensions

Developer – Activo

6.  Speedster

Speed is key, not only as a ranking factor, but for your users and customers too. Our expectations are getting higher all of the time and we will not wait; a slow website will have a big impact on your bounce and conversion rate.

This little extension will minify your html/CSS/javascript reducing the amount of calls required to the server.

Speedster - Free Magento Extensions

Developer – Fooman

7.  Magento Blog

If you are not ready for a full on WordPress blog or would like to keep the costs down then this is a great alternative.  While not as feature rich as WordPress it is a great alternative to get you started and posting lots of useful information into your website.

magento blog aheadworks

Developer – Aheadworks

8.  Review Side Block

Statistics vary from study to study but it is universally agreed a strong review presence will encourage and reassure your potential customers before purchase.

This extension will allow you to easily display reviews in the side column of your website so they are a constant throughout your users browser settings.

Screen Shot 2016-09-21 at 14.05.04

Developer – Amasty

9.  Enhanced Product grid

When a standard overview of your products just isn’t quite enough!  This free extension will allow you to customise your product overview, including the thumbnails (which we think is really handy!).

You can also export the overview via CSV or XML which makes it a great tool to export products rather than using Magento’s built in tool.

enhanced product grid - sweettooth

Developer – Sweet Tooth

10.  Order Status by Colour

A nifty little extension that allows you to colour code your order statuses so you can see at a quick glance what states your orders are, particularly useful if you have lots of orders.

The end result would look like this:  (need to blur out customer names)

magento

Developer – The Extension Lab

These are just some of the freebies that we’ve played with in the past, but I know there are a lot of them out there!  If you have any favourites please let me know and we will add them to the list.