10 must-have modules for your Magento webshop

There is no doubt that Magento is a great e-commerce platform, but developing and running a Magento webshop is a time-consuming and daunting task.You  should use all the help that you can find. The help can be from professionals, developers and Magento community, or in form of modules and tools.

Over the years, we have come across certain modules that makes it slightly easier to maintain a Magento webshop, or atleast run it more efficiently.

Here is a list of 10 modules that we suggest every Magento webshop admin should try and install in his webshop.
They not only help you with certain tasks that are not possible in default Magento stores but also help you in keeping your shop secure and running smoothly.

1. AOE Scheduler

This module extends Magento's default cron functionality and allows the admin to manage their cron jobs easily from Magento backend.
You can also use it to monitor your cron jobs and check if something is going wrong with them. It is also useful when you want to run a specific job manually from backend.
AOE Scheduler

2. Async indexer

Indexers and re-indexes are an integral and important part of Magento work flow. It is super essential that your indexers are running regularly and your data is being indexer correctly. In Magento 1, you have to run re-indexing via cron jobs or do it manually from backend. But with Asynchronous Re-indexing the indexer keeps running in the background and indexes the newly edited data. This keeps the webshop server free from running heavy re-indexers in one go. This one is a paid module though: Fast Asynchronous Re-indexing. Magento 2 has included Asynchronous Re-indexing as part of its default features.  

3. Aschroder SMTP

This one is a great and free module if you are struggling with your transactional email delivery to all kinds of email ids. With this module you can easily send Magento transactional emails via your own (or client's) SMTP server.
You can also use your Gmail and Google Apps to send out emails from your webshop. This makes sure the emails do not land in spam box of receiver. You can also use Amazon SES. It also have an easy to use interface and self-test options. Magento-SMTP-Pro-Email-Extension

4. Magento backend grid customization

Everyone knows that Magento backend grids are minimal in nature and sometimes miss to display important information on list pages. If you have added custom attributes to any section and if they are important for your business flow then you might want to add them to your list view itself. There are many modules that help you customize your product or order grid in backend. We found this one useful but it is not maintained or supported anymore, so not recommended: BL_CustomGrid

5. Order deleter

How many times have you wanted to delete your test orders or some old orders that have some issue or are not needed anymore? Default Magento does not allows that. We recommend you use the following: Delete orders.

6. Same invoice number

Magento by default uses different increment numbers for order, invoices, shipments and credit-memos. Even though they all start with the same number, they go out of sync very quickly. Many book-keepers and businesses prefer that all order numbers and invoice numbers are kept same in their live shops. This module helps with that requirement. Same Order Invoice Number  

7. PDF customiser

Standard Magento PDFs are not really great or sufficient to be honest, so we do not recommend using them as they are.
Guys at Fooman made this great extension which helps you customize those PDFS:
Magento 1: Fooman PDF customizer
Magento 2: Fooman PDF customer (Magento 2)

8. Conflict detector

This one is more of a developer tool than admin tool but it does helps you in finding and avoiding issues and conflicts between your modules. It happens many times that certain modules are not compatible with each other as they work on same classes or features and cause issues when they both are activated together. This module can help you detect and resolve these issues. Modules conflict detector.

9. Watchlog

Since Magento is a popular platform, it attracts its share of brute force attacks. Brute force attacks can not only harm your site if successful, but they also waste alot of server resources while they are at it. This module helps you in detecting those attacks in timely manner so that you can take necessary steps. Watchlog  

10. Google reCaptcha

If you have a Magento webshop, you would have already faced issues with spam customer registrations or spam newsletter subscribers or even even spam contact form submissions. All these spam attacks are done via scripts and bots that attack specific forms on target Magento webshops. This module helps you in implementing invisible Google reCaptcha on all your Magento forms so that only humans can use forms on your site. Google Invisible reCaptcha. There are also other ways to implement Google reCatpcha on your forms, but we found this the easiest.

That concludes our list of modules that you should try, for now. We will try to update the list in future as and when we come across more useful modules.

Feel free to contact Hungersoft for a free consultation. We can provide you with more in-depth and useful insights about your Magento webshop and help you with developing and running it efficiently.

Disclaimer: This is only a suggestion list and these are all external modules and their respective owners hold all the copyrights to their work. We cannot vouch for the quality of any of the modules mentioned above. In our experience, they have worked well for us in past and are reliable enough. But like any other software, they too can can have issues and glitches. It is strongly recommended that you try them on a development environment first before you install on your live site.