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9 Great Plug-Ins to Optimize your Magento Website

Steve Susina • April 23, 2014

9 Plug-Ins to Optimize your Magento Site

As a Magento Gold Partner with plenty of experience with eCommerce consulting, we’ve had a lot of experience with implementing extensions for the platform.

Here are some of our favorite add-ons that help you launch and optimize your successful site.

Jirafe

Jirafe enables a merchant to accurately connect customer website behavior with actual order, cart, product, and customer sales data. Unlike other analytics tools, Jirafe doesn’t just capture and transfer order and cart data via javascript calls; it’s directly integrated into Magento site’s back-end order processing system. This low-level integration enables it to capture a much larger, deeper and more accurate dataset in near real-time. Tools for importing and processing historical data are included with the module.

Jirafe’s Ecommerce Analytics service is built around a feature-rich web application for analyzing this captured data. Besides having the expected sales and site activity reports, it also provides tools for data mining customer behavioral information for improved product merchandising and sales performance.

Listrak

Listrak is used frequently for retargeting abandoned shopping carts to increase revenue. About 3 hours after a customer has abandoned a shopping cart, this extension will send emails to re-engage the customer with a message to aid in purchase decisions and prompt buying. “Back in stock” alerts may also be used as a retargeting solution. Listrak campaigns have high response rates and aid in significantly increasing conversion rates.

AddThis  

This extension adds an AddThis button set to the product view page so that the end user can share the product URL to different social media websites with ease. The extension also allows you to add the buttons to the template and CMS pages in which you have created. The module allows easy access from a merchant perspective to add icons to pages.

Amasty Promotions Pro

The Amasty Promotions Pro extension allows a site to use very commonly thought of promotions on Magento store, as well as some unique and complex promotions. The ability to offer a free product with a purchase is common practice for eCommerce sites. The Amasty extension makes this type of promotion, which can often be complicated to implement, easy to configure. There is a tremendous amount of different promotion options that the extension provides.

WebshopApps MatrixRate

This extension extends Magento table rate functionality to better suit merchants’ needs. The MatrixRate shipping extension allows a simple way of adding and modifying rates by non-technical people. It has played a significant role in cutting implementation and maintenance costs for our merchants.

Optimizely 

Optimizely offers an intuitive method for adding A/B testing to your Magento storefront. All the A/B versions are managed via the Optimizely site, so there is no additional theming that needs to be done in Magento. The installation process is very simple, as it only adds a JavaScript block to the top of the html. The JavaScript then loads content from the Optimizely site based on the configured A/B test, and asynchronously updates the content on the site. Optimizely is light weight and does not add much to the load time of the pages under. If your site is having conversion issues, performing A/B tests using Optimizely is a way to understand the user experience and improve your site.

aheadWorks Featured Product

This extension enables merchants to automate the way products are featured on their sites through easy to use tools built into the Admin interface. Many merchants appreciate Featured Products for its simple, yet flexible functionality and use it to showcase their products in an impressive way.

CJM Color Swatches

This extension allows a customer on a site to easily choose the color of a product.  The merchant doesn’t have to create images for the swatches, but instead can just enter the hex code of the colors within the color attributes options. From there the merchant can set the color attribute identifier and swatch size in the configuration. The module will automatically create the swatches for all configurable products or you can upload swatches via the swatches panel that is included.

Unirgy uStoreLocator

This extension has become a go-to solution for store locator needs. It’s easy to customize and due to an already existing functionality, cuts down on the implementation costs for projects. The uStoreLocator is an important tool for the many merchants who have physical stores.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows a site administrator to control all of the tracking pixels, conversion scripts, and all other components that require dynamic tracking content to be added to a Magento site. Before extensions like Google Tag Manager, if a site signed up with a new affiliate marketing company, the site administrator would have to ask their development team to add a new pixel to the bottom of every page. The Google Tag Manager extension just adds a script tag to the bottom of every page and asynchronously loads all of the pixels and tags required. Through the Google Tag Manager Admin, a site administrator can add and remove scripts and pixels easily without requiring a new deployment of code to their production system.

What are your favorite integrations? Let us know in the comments below.


Steve Susina

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Steve Susina

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