Joomla currently keeps a 9.4% market share of the CMS world, powering 3.2% of all the websites on the internet. It’s mostly used for institutional, news and company websites, and e-commerce stores. Joomla is often chosen for its simplicity (even though the latest versions haven’t improved much in this direction, it is still a CMS you can teach your clients how to use) and for the enormous number of extensions that allow users to enhance their Joomla-powered websites.
For e-commerce, businesses and service-related websites it’s extremely important to get the most out of their Joomla websites to assist their marketing efforts. To achieve this, it’s often necessary to install third-party extensions that provide additional features. Here is a list of the top marketing extensions for Joomla right now.
1. Mailchimp Integration For Joomla! (Free)
Mailchimp is a well-known web-based service for managing, sending and monitoring newsletters. It’s a great tool, surprisingly simple to set up and use, extremely powerful in its report features, and it’s used by a whole bunch of startups and websites. Mailchimp Integration For Joomla! lets you add newsletter subscription capabilities to your Joomla site, connecting it to your Mailchimp account. With this extension you get the power of Mailchimp with the flexibility of being able to sign up visitors to your newsletters directly from your site, saving you a significant amount of time by managing your lists and setting up your server to avoid spam-related issues.
2. sh404SEF (Commercial)
Joomla was often criticized in the past for its scarce SEO support. sh404SEF is a long-established extension that adds powerful SEO capabilities to your Joomla site, allowing you to satisfy many of the Google recommendations for SEO just by installing and activating it. It’s not the easiest extension to set up, and a certain Joomla skill and experience is required to get the best out of it, but the results are surely worth the effort. An absolute must for anyone who is serious about search engine optimization in their Joomla-powered websites.
3. SEOSimple (Free)
SEOSimple is a golden extension if you don’t want to dedicate time to SEO. As its description states, SEOSimple “simply takes the starting chunk of text from the page’s content and applies that as the value for the meta description tag in the page’s head”. Install it, activate it, and you’re done. Good if you don’t have time to work on SEO and you don’t care about great results in positioning your site at the top of Google search. SEOSimple is used by many webmasters as a fallback solution to fill meta description tags in pages where custom descriptions are not manually set.
4. DM A/B Test (Commercial)
Anyone who is serious about web marketing knows the importance of setting up A/B tests to check the efficacy of different content versions or layouts on the website’s conversion rates. Just changing a tagline can often lead to great differences in conversion results. DM A/B Test brings simple A/B testing capabilities to Joomla, with a very easy-to-set-up component: you can create your first A/B split test in a couple of minutes, providing two different versions of the same article’s or module’s content and start gathering data right away. From the admin panel, you can then review the test results comparing the performance of different variations of content. Great for web marketers who use Joomla for their projects and don’t want to meddle with more advanced (and difficult to master) tools.
5. J4age (Free)
For many web developers, Google Analytics is a must-have that can’t be overlooked when setting up a new website. For others, having analytics data directly in the Joomla admin panel, using a pure Joomla component for user tracking, is the preferred choice: in this case, j4age is the extension to look for. J4age is an open-source effort to create a native Joomla analytics and statistics tool; though not as powerful as Google Analytics, it features the plus of being installed directly on your website, enabling the most experienced users to tweak its tracking algorithms and to customize its behavior. Perfect if you love to have all your website’s data directly under your control.
About The Author:
Daniele Grassi is a UX Designer and CTO of Timeneye Time Tracking, a time tracking web app designed with usability in mind. Follow him on Twitter or on his personal blog.