The Best Free Blogging Extensions for Magento

Adjusting your website for a blog is useful due to several reasons. Firstly, you make it possible for your customers to not only buy but also discover something new on your store. This creates additional reason to visit the website more often. Secondly, you convert your website into a well-formed source of information, which makes you even more reliable for search engines. Finally, if you share interesting information with your customers, you will definitely improve your conversion rates and increase the level of your audience loyalty.

The Best Blogging Extensions for Magento 2

There are a lot of high-end blogging platforms being used by millions of users from all over the world. Such platforms as WordPress, Tumblr, Squarespace, Google Blogger, and Weebly are only a few of the most commonly used ones. You can get to know the best blogging platforms of 2015 in the related profound post of ours.

Although it is possible to use any of the above mentioned platforms for online store blogging, there is a high need for uniting store and blog features in one website to simplify interaction with customers and provide a powerful medium for driving more sales to your website. As a result, a number of blog extensions have been developed to help E-commerce merchants to take full advantage of their blogging experience. Magento users can also make use of specialized Magento blog modules from the list below.

Free blogging solutions for Magento

Let’s look at the best Magento blog extensions that are available for free.

Blog – Community Edition by aheadWorks

This is an official blog extension for Magento developed by aheadWorks team specially for Magento users. This module will help you to manage regular news posts and announcements for existing customers as well as new visitors that might become tempted by your discounts and special offers. Also, the module generates SEO-effective text links and contributes to creating original and valuable content that is likely to attract more attention and improve your search engine ranking. In addition, you can provide your Magento blog with feedback features allowing users to share their opinion and involve into public discussion. This extension also includes:

• Native RSS feed + blog RSS + Multistore RSS

• Switch on/off feature for multiple stores

• Widget displaying the latest blog posts

• Ability to set various categories and hashtags to your posts

• Compatibility with the latest Magento version

• Ability to duplicate posts

• Native Magento WYSIWYG editor

nBlog – Blog extension by Neotheme

This Magento blog module is another option for introducing blogging feature on your Magento website. It offers a set of predesigned layouts that can be used for various categories of your blog posts. You can also utilize a delayed posting feature that enables writing posts and setting them to be published at any particular time in the future automatically. Since the module provides blog RSS integration, you will now have standard RSS feed connected to the blog feed allowing your customers to find appropriate posts more easily. Moreover, your Magento blog will acquire Facebook commenting feature, which means that if users decide to leave a comment under your post, they will only have to log in to their Facebook accounts. This feature also assumes that Facebook comments’ functionality is fully available on Magento store as well.

Blog Pro by MagPleasure

Blog Pro is an advanced Magento blog extension that helps you to create a SEO-friendly blog with the most relevant information for your customers beginning with discount announcements and ending with useful recommendation on how to deal with your products. The main concern of this extension is to make your blog posts as responsive as possible. Thus, you can enrich your text with various thumbnails, images, videos and other elements that are likely to attract users’ attention. The module also supports social media sharing feature which gives you an opportunity to automatically extend your presence to larger audiences. Other important features of Blog Pro extension include:

• E-mail notifications about published posts and new comments from users
• Variety of color schemes and design templates
• Support of WYSIWYG editor
• User-friendly links
• Ability to build effective Meta tags, titles and text URL’s
• Anti-bot protection
• Ability to create unlimited amount of categories.
• Advanced layout constructor for blog pages
• Universal RSS support
• Latest blog posts and comments widgets
• Enhanced search engine
• Ability to switch on/off comments under particular posts

Magento WorPress integration

For those of you who discovered the world of limitless blogging opportunities of WordPress, there is a free extension developed by FishPig team that provides WordPress blog integration to Magento online stores. This extension supports all Magento plans including Magento Enterprise, Magento Professional and Magento Community Edition. Furthermore, the module is available in multiple languages to make you more comfortable with configuring various settings. With this extension at hand, you get a profound Magento blog with almost all major features of WordPress including:

• A set of the most relevant WordPress plugins such as Disqus Comments, ReciPress, Akismet, and others
• WordPress post association with Magento products
• Full WordPress blog integration with an opportunity to use original URL’s for keeping your SEO unaffected
• WordPress shortcodes support
• Ability to login to your WordPress account right from Magento admin panel
• Special Magento theme for your WordPress blog