The world of ecommerce has seen plenty of blockbuster acquisitions in recent years, with the biggest story of last year coming at the tail end when Adobe acquired Magento for $1.68 billion. This lofty purchase puts the software maker in direct contention with rivals such as Shopify, 3dcart, BigCommerce and others—and cements its standing as a premier provider of ecommerce shopping cart software.

Considering that Magento has more than 250,000 active users, the move to purchase it by Adobe was a no-brainer. If you’re looking to upgrade to Magento 2, you’ll also want to know what types of extensions you can use to add features and new functionality to your online store. To give you a head start, here’s our top picks for the eight of the best Magento 2 extensions currently available

Blog

Our top pick for Magento 2 extensions is made by a premier Magento extensions builder called Aheadworks. This extension is by far one of the most useful and is simply called Blog. Basically, this extension adds a feature-rich blog to your online store.

Features include pagination, breadcrumbs, tagging, SEO (meta, title, H-tags), post categories, sidebars, specific meta data, and more. There are no technical skills required because this extension uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface. This means that you can add this extension and make updates to it by pointing and clicking or dragging and dropping items within the interface

Why add a blogging extension to your online store? Just look at these ecommerce blogging statistics:

• Blogs are the top marketing priority for 53% of marketers.
• Blogging gets 94% more traffic than images.
• 65% of marketers boosted their blogging efforts in 2017.
• Websites with blogs have 434% more indexed pages.
• 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before talking to a sales team.

Cost of Extension: $349 one-time fee (12 months of support adds $140 to charge)

Compatible With: Community 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Enterprise 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Social Login

With social commerce representing at least 5% of all ecommerce sales in 2019, it’s easy to understand why social logins for your online store are immensely popular. More than 65% of people rely on social media to find the products and services they use online, and you now you have a way to make it effortless for them to checkout and create an account at your online store via the Social Login extension for Magento 2.

With this extension, new and existing customers can either create an account or login to an existing account in just a couple of clicks. This extension is designed to work with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte, Pinterest, PayPal, and uses information from the user’s corresponding social account to profligate internal data. What’s more, Social Login also adds a tab to the “customer area” that stores and manages these accounts, giving users the ability to update or remove accounts if necessary.

Cost of Extension: $249 one-time fee (12 months of support adds $100 to charge)

Compatible With: Community 2.1, 2.2 Enterprise 2.1, 2.2

Intenso Reviews

Without product reviews, you won’t get as many sales. It’s pretty clear-cut: product reviews increase conversion rates across the board. One reason is because they improve overall shopper trust. Another is because they help shoppers find the products they’re looking for while reducing returns and improving conversion and long-term loyalty along the way.

These statistics on product reviews can help you better understand their conversion potential:

• 37% of shoppers rely on reviews from review sites to make a purchasing decision.
• 63% of consumers find product reviews from a search engine query.
• 54% of the time, consumers will click over to an online store from a positive review.
• 87% of consumers place as much trust in a product review as they would word-to-mouth.
• 68% of consumers will decide whether to use a product or service after reading 1-6 reviews.
• 59% of consumers scout reviews from 2-3 different review sites before buying.
• 50% of consumers that were asked to leave a review about a product or service have.
• 78% of consumers who bought after reading a review report being satisfied.

Now that you know you need product reviews to get more sales, the best extension for Magento 2 that offers them is called: Intenso Reviews. It adds integrated product reviews to every product page of your Magento 2 store, complete with advanced filtering, comments, one-step review submission, automated email reminders, and much more.

Cost of Extension: $149 one-time fee

Compatible With: Community 2.0, 2.1, 2.2

Product Questions

Amazon has helped raise the bar in ecommerce, and one feature that’s made this marketplace juggernaut stand out is with the product questions feature. New and existing data finds that when stores add product questions and answers, conversions increase across the board. This is because as questions are answered positively, they act as reviews, with statistics finding that traffic and conversions increase by as much as 37% with enough positive reviews, while average order value can increase by as much as 3%.

To get this uncanny uplift, though, you’ll need a way for your prospective shoppers to ask questions and have them answered. That’s where the Product Questions extension comes into the picture.

This extension lets you add FAQs to every product in your store, with integrated, real-time threads that enable your customer support team or other verified users to answer the questions. It also creates a steady stream of user-generated content that’s fresh and relevant, enabling your pages to gain quality control score from Google, which means that they’ll rank better and get more traffic over time.

Cost of Extension: $299 one-time fee (12 months of support adds $120 to charge)

Compatible With: Community 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Enterprise 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Social Share

We’ve long proclaimed that social commerce was at the forefront of the future of ecommerce. Along the way, we’ve toiled to create detailed guides that give you powerful marketing tips for social commerce that can help you tap into this $4 billion per year industry.

Well with the Social Share extension for Magento 2, you can put every social strategy for ecommerce you’ve derived or learned into full motion.

This extension adds powerful social sharing buttons to the product pages of your online store. It lets users instantly share their favorite products in just a click. Each button is customizable, a thank you popup is activated after sharing, and it works just fine on tablets and smartphones. What’s not to like?

Cost of extension: $0.00

Compatible With: Community 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 Enterprise 2.1, 2.2, 2.3

Magento 2 Shop By Brand 

Customers frequently search for their favourite brands when they first access online stores. It seems preferable to avoid getting in the client’s way. With Magento 2 Shop by Brand by Mageplaza, you can provide brand standards directly in your Magento 2 store, greatly facilitating and streamlining the brand-to-customer interaction.

Customers may quickly locate their preferred brands using a search box with this plugin, or they can filter by alphabet or featured brands. A brief description and the brand logo will also be visible on the product page. If your clients can quickly recognize the product brand, they will be delighted.

The most popular Shop by Brand functionalities can also be displayed on mobile and tablet interfaces thanks to PWA compatibility. You can therefore advertise brand products on any device and increase mobile traffic.

Advanced Content Manager 2

We’ve preached and preached about how content is king when it comes to marketing anything online these days, especially ecommerce goods. How you present your content to the world and share it can mean the difference between a thriving or a struggling online store.

Whether you’re relying on user-generated content to help drive awareness and sales for your brand or whether you are hashing out homegrown, gourmet content that search engines devour, one obstacle remains in your path: how to curate, manage, organize, display and share this content.

The Advanced Content Manager 2 extension solves these worries once and for all by adding a Drupal/WordPress styled content management system (CMS) to your Magento 2 storefront’s backend.

It lets you create, curate, style and share content such as blogs, landing pages, articles and more, with customizable templates, intuitive user interface, lookbook entries, testimonials, galleries, and more.

You can also add images to content, and even associate certain types of content with different products or pages, with integrated SEO tools for optimization, as well as embedded social sharing tools. It’s the only content management tool you’ll ever need!

Cost of extension: $349 (12 months of support adds $300 to charge)

Compatible With: Community 2.1, 2.3

Super Easy SEO

What good would be doing all this work to get your online store noticed if nobody was able to find it an online search? We’ve already offered some helpful tips on ways that you can improve ecommerce SEO in just a few steps. But if you don’t have the right tools in place before you get started, you’re facing an uphill battle.

The fact of the matter is that ecommerce SEO requires internal and on-page optimization that can be tedious without the right tools in place. To help get you there faster, make sure you look at this awesome Magento 2 extension called Super Easy SEO.

It’s loaded with every tool that you’ll need to start optimizing your store for better rankings. This includes features like titles, metas, tagging, h-tags, keywords, canonical URLs, pagination, breadcrumbs, redirects and more.

Cost of extension: $199 one-time fee

Compatible With: Community 2.1, 2.3

Hopefully our picks for the eight best Magento 2 extensions helps you improve your online store. In the meanwhile, if you need even more information, have a look at this detailed infographic we’ve included below.