Best Joomla Extensions And Components You Must See
Every Joomla website – whatever the focus, requires a number of essential things to make sure it’s top-notch. If you’re not taking care of these essentials, you’re probably missing out on a lot of value. That’s why we’ve created a list of best Joomla extensions are that every site needs to take it to the next level.
1. SP Page Builder
With more and more people getting into the online world, people want to be able to build their websites quickly and easily.
Content editors and modules used to be the thing. But today there is a new normal.
It’s called drag and drop page building.
This revolution started first in WordPress, but Joomla quickly caught on to the trend and Joom Shaper have come up with the killer page builder for Joomla.
SP Page Builder is the number 1 drag and drop page builder for Joomla.
The beauty of this page builder is that it allows you to create a website without any coding at all. Actually, not just any website, but a great looking website! You can use many of the available add-ons as “parts” to drag and drop such as:
- Accordion
- Contact Form
- Joomla module
- Alert message
- Carousel
- Buttons
- Countdown
- Feature Box
- Google Map
- Gallery
- Pricing table
- Images
- Progress Bar
- Testimonials
- Timeline
- Twitter Feed
- …and many more.
It also integrates nicely with other Joomla components so you can drag and drop articles, products, and K2 items!
2. ACYMailing
If you’re not doing email marketing – you’re leaving money on the table.
If you have a website – then you should be building your email list – that’s web marketing 101. And if you’re building an email list and sending out mailshots – you should be doing it with the most popular Joomla extension for emailing: ACYMailing.
This software is a fully-fledged mailing component – feature-rich, and gets ticks in all the right boxes.
You’ve got multiple scripts and components to allow you to grow your email list quickly and integrates very neatly with the CMS – allowing you such benefits as adding a user to an email list upon registration.
We’ve got it set up and bringing in more sales – and you should too!
First things you should do after you install AcyMailing:
a. Create your first list – let’s call it “Our Awesome newsletter”
b. Configure your Sender Information and Mail Information. You’ll want to look to your hosting server’s CPanel mailing information to do this.
Configuration > Configuration > Mail Configuration
The sender information should be pretty straightforward (make sure the From and Bounce email addresses have been created)
You’re most likely to use an SMTP server whose information is available through your hosting server’s CPanel information. Typically it’s something like mail..com but double-check with your server. If you use an external mailing service such as Amazon’s Simple Email Service – this is where you should set it up with the details provided
Setup newsletter sender information
Setup newsletter mailing server information
c. Enable the auto-subscribe during Joomla registration plugin. You can configure all the look and feel options by clicking on the (auto)Subscribe during registration Enable auto subscribe during Joomla registration
d. Create a module which allows user to register and call the module from your best content. Set it up in position subscribe – then call it from your best content using the {loadposition.subscribe} trigger text.
Create mailing list subscribe module
Which would look like this in your content:
e. Create your first newsletter – test it and queue it up and Process it. Enjoy the boost in traffic 🙂
3. JFBConnect
Joomla extension to Get People to Engage via their Facebook profile
A must-have piece of functionality on your website is integration with Facebook. With more than 2.5 billion active users in 2020 – this is by far the biggest active network anywhere.
You’ll want to ride that wave.
Integrating comments via a user’s Facebook profile is great for a number of reasons:
Users don’t need to register or create a new profile – they just log in with Facebook
You won’t have (a lot of) abuse or SPAM because most people want to keep their Facebook clean
Commenting via Facebook is a normally accepted method of commenting on the web
You’ll get an additional boost in traffic from people seeing their friends commenting on your website or engaging each other on your site.
First things to do after installing JFBConnect
- Run an AutoTune and follow the instructions carefully
Run the JCFBConnect autotune
- Enable Automatic registration (to gather emails for your newsletter (see above)
Enable automatic Joomla registration
- Configure the Facebook comments look and feel
Configure the Joomla Facebook Comments look and feel
- Configure the share buttons for various social networks
Configure share buttons for various social networks
- Enjoy the boost in traffic and engagement
4. Akeeba Backup
Make sure you have a reliable Joomla extension to create a backup
Ok, so you’ve probably been through this yourself – or heard the horror stories.
You forgot to update a specific extension, or skip a core update, and suddenly your site has been hacked, defaced, is spewing malware all over the place, and who knows what’s become of your content.
Or even worse, you make a mistake and you delete something crucial, with no way to revert your change. Panic ensues.
What do you do when the brown stuff has hit the fan? Of course, you go back to what you should have had in the first place.
A reliable backup.
If there is one single extension we would say is absolutely critical to your site – it’s Akeeba Backup. It’s an elegant, reliable, and stable backup solution. No website should live without it, and if you want your life to be easy peasy, Akeeba backup is the way to go for your backups. It’s brain-dead easy to use.
The first things you should after installing Akeeba Backup
Run the Configuration Wizard to determine the ideal setup for your websiteakeeba backup configuration wizard
Take your first backupTake a joomla backup with akeeba backup
Download your first backup and store it somewhere safely (Dropbox is a good ideaDownload your joomla backup
Create a backup schedule or create a reminder for yourself to run a backup (at least) every week. Do other necessary stuff such as excluding directories with large files which you don’t need to backup or create different backup profiles
5. EasyBlog
Because this Joomla extension makes your site great for blogging too!
Despite not being as popular as WordPress for blogging, or have much of a reputation for this, Joomla is great for blogging too! We would know – we’ve been using it for blogging for more than 15 years now, and of course, we wouldn’t have if we didn’t find that it suited our purpose well 🙂
Nevertheless, there’s so much more that can be achieved by a blogging platform – so we’re going out on a limb and suggesting and even greater set of blogging tools for it.
EasyBlog has been the defacto blogging component to go far if you are serious about blogging … we can’t rave enough about it. Access control, notifications, team blogging, location services, social support, support for most major 3rd party integrations, there’s no better choice for blogging with Joomla!
A few great things you can do with EasyBlog
EasyBlog 5.4.2 has recently been released. Version 5 had introduced a new and unique text editor, the EasyBlog 5 composer. One of the unique qualities of the composer is the option to add elements, called blocks, on the blog post by using drag-n-drop or tap-n-drop.
Let’s see how you can embed and share your favourite songs from Spotify into your EasyBlog post with 4 simple steps:
a. Open up the Composer and tap on your preferred block. For this tutorial, we’ll use the “Spotify” blockEasyBlog add a spotify block
b. Once you’ve tapped on the Spotify block, you will be shown your composer page again. Click on any space on your composer to drop the block, and the Share Spotify Music option will be shown.Easyblog share spotify music
c. Fire up your Spotify, right-click on the songs that you wish to share, and chose “Copy Track Link”.EasyBlog Spotify copy track link
d. Moving back to your Composer, paste the link in the text box and click “Embed Spotify”
Easyblog embed spotify
EasyBlog music from spotify in JoomlaThat’s it! The song is embedded in your post; clicking “Publish Post” will share the post along with the embedded Spotify player so that your visitors are able to listen to the song without having to load up Spotify.
6. JSitemap
Because you really want Google to know about all your content!
If there is one important visitor to your site, we’ve always said, it’s Google.
With Google being one of the biggest potential drivers of traffic, you need to make sure that the search engine knows about all of your content, all about your freshest content, when it’s been updated, the structure of your site, and when your content has been freshly updated.
Although this may seem like a huge task, in reality, it’s covered by one simple piece of functionality – an XML sitemap. Essentially, this is a map of all your content that can be submitted to Google WebMasters to “advise” Google about your site’s content.
Now – how do you generate this freaking sitemap? – especially if you have a website with lots and lots of content.
Fret not – we’ve got the solution for you! And that solution comes via the Joomla extension: JSitemap!
JSitemap is an essential Joomla component that can be used to generate the XML sitemap with the content of your website for submission to Google WebMasters.
It makes the task of generating the sitemap really trivial.
Of course, the Sitemap can be submitted to ALL major search engines such as Bing, Yandex, and even Baidu! But besides generating an XML Sitemap – this component does so much more.
Not only does it generate the sitemap for your own content, it also indexes content from any 3rd party components you have installed, and content from RSS feeds. And since we know how important it is to keep the search engines updated, JSitemap also auto pings search engines and aggregators when new content is added or updated.
Oh yes – before we forget – a sitemap is a good thing to have for your real visitors too – the humans who visit your website. They’ll be able to quickly identify what content they want to visit.
Yes – JSitemap does this too 😉
First things you’ll want to do after installing JSitemap
The great thing about JSitemap is that most times it configures itself fully without your intervention, so you only need to get installed most times, and right after the install it will self-configure.
View the HTML and then the XML Sitemap by going to Control Panel > Show HTML Sitemap and Show Raw XML SitemapsJSitemap Control Panel2. Customize the HTML sitemap to your heart’s desire via the Configuration icon on the Control Panel and refresh the HTML generated to see the changes.JSitemap XML Sitemap
If you’ve got any 3rd party Joomla extensions like K2, or whatever else, go to Control Panel > Connect Data Sources and click New data source and let JSitemap work its magic. Refresh the content of the XML and HTML sitemap and admire your handy work ;-)JSitemap adding a new datasource
In the SEO dashboard – submit the XML Sitemaps to Google, Bing and Yandex by simply following the wizard.
JSitemap Google Webmasters Statistics
Really and truly, this component is amazing. No wonder it’s a Community choice!
Have a further look at the following YouTube video to see more fun stuff you can do with JSitemap.