We thought it was about time we followed up a post from 2009 where we talked about 5 essential Magento extensions. A lot has changed on the Magento landscape in the last 2 years and so have the extensions we couldn’t live without. So, updated for 2011 here is our current list of essential Magento extensions:

One Pica Image CDN

This extension allows you to serve all product images from a content delivery network. It currently works with Amazon S3, Coral, Rackspace Cloud Files and any service that supports FTP, FTPS, or SFTP. This will improve the performance of your store, reduce the load on your server, and probably save you some cash on bandwidth too!

MailChimp Sync by Ebizmarts

Our good friends at Ebizmarts produced this Magento module for us a couple of years ago. It has since been released on Magento connect and has received well over 5,000 downloads. It sync’s your newsletter subscribers in Magento with your Mail Chimp account. This trusty little module has served us well over the years and we’re pleased to see that Ebizmarts have also now released a Pro version, which boasts some very cool features indeed.

Magento Invoice Extension

Anyone who has worked with Magento will agree that the PDF invoice design really, really sucks. Luckily, Webshopapps have produced a great extension that improves the appearance of Magento invoices and also allows for customisation of what information appears on the PDF printouts. The extension costs a mere £50, and is worth every penny in our opinion.

Luxe Bestsellers

We use this one quite a lot – it pulls through a list of best selling products into a block, which can be displayed anywhere on your site.  It’s a great way to pull fresh content onto, say the home page, without really having to do very miuch. We generally use the “enterprise” version of this extension (nothing to do with Magento Enterprise) but there is also a free version on Magento connect.

One Step Checkout

This extension needs little introduction, as these guys have already made quite a name for themselves. While this module isn’t perfect, it vastly improves Magento’s default checkout process and we wouldn’t build a site without it. Some of my favourite features include hiding the shipping method box if only one method is available, auto select your preferred payment and shipping method, and GeoIP lookup.

Your Essential Extensions…

We’d love you to post a comment telling us about the Magento extensions you couldn’t live without…