Must Have Magento Modules – Part 1: Free

May 16, 2011 By Adam,

With thousands of modules available in Magento Connect, finding the right tool for the job can sometimes be a daunting task. Below are the top 5 free Magento modules that we think every store must have. They will help improve the performance of your website (in turn a better user experience) and the efficiency of managing your store.

Fooman Speedster - Compresses and caches your Javascript and CSS files, increasing the speed of page loads and reducing the hits on your server.
Fooman Google Analytics Plus - Tracks every step of the one page checkout and other pages that use AJAX for multiple sections, allowing you to better understand and analyze the conversion funnel.
One Pica CDN - Offload your product and category images to a content delivery network (CDN) such as Amazon S3, and Rackspace Cloud Files, reducing the load on your server and increasing the speed of page loads.
Jirafe Analytics - The missing Magento dashboard that displays real time analytics and actionable data, empowering you to better understand your customers' conversion process.
Enhanced Admin Product Grid - Better manage your products and save time with a set of robust and customizable admin tools, including product search, grid row highlighter, grid thumbnails, persistent catalog grid settings, mass product refresh, quick export and more.

Stay tuned for part 2 that will include 5 great paid modules. Let us know your experiences with these modules and any that you think we missed.