Layered navigation helps Magento 2 websites improve user experience, increase conversion rates, boost customer loyalty, and enhance SEO, thus benefiting both users and businesses.
To find a perfect layered navigation solution for your store, you need to research, analyze, and compare multiple options. This time, we've done all the hard work for you and created this comparison page for the two most popular Layered Navigation extensions: Mageplaza and Amasty. Both extensions have 3 pricing options, and we’ll take the most feature-rich plans.
Why Layered Navigation Matters for E-Commerce Success
Layered navigation is a powerful tool that allows shoppers to filter products by attributes such as price, brand, size, or custom features. For Magento 2 e-commerce websites, especially those with large or complex catalogs, it greatly improves the user experience by helping customers find exactly what they need quickly. When buyers can narrow down options without the necessity for endless scrolling, frustration decreases and engagement increases.
Layered navigation can boost conversion rates. Showing only relevant products and making the journey to purchase faster encourages shoppers to complete their orders and return for future purchases. For B2B stores, where buyers often have specific requirements or multistep approval processes, effective filtering is critical to support efficient decision-making.
Layered navigation also supports SEO and site performance. Properly configured filters generate clean, indexable URLs and can create additional landing pages for targeted searches. If your Magento 2 website is well-optimized, layered navigation helps make even large stores run faster, be organized, and easy to navigate, contributing to business growth.
What is Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2?
Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 extension is a strong tool that significantly enhances the product filtering capabilities of an online store. It allows customers to refine their search results based on various attributes like color, sales, new collections, etc., thus providing a more intuitive and efficient shopping experience.
What is Amasty Improved Layered Navigation?
Amasty Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2 is a feature-rich navigation module that allows you to easily boost customer shopping experience by adding a rich variety of catalog filters by any product attribute (price, color, in stock, brand, size, etc.). All these filters can be organized in a handy navigation menu on your website. Besides, Improved Layered Navigation lets you generate custom brand pages, optimizing your website for dedicated commercial queries in search engines.
Amasty Improved Layered Navigation module, unlike similar solutions from other providers, allows you to equip your website with a highly flexible vertical filter scroll. Besides, it allows shoppers to filter goods by attribute of any kind, use custom Magento 2 Layered Navigation price sliders and 'from-to' widgets, create filter dependencies, and enjoy smooth and obstacle-free shopping with infinite scroll.
For Magento 2 site owners, Amasty Improved Layered Navigation includes Brand Merchandiser, letting them add pages for brands with stunning logos and detailed information, and optimize their store for search engines. In-built filter analytics feature helps gain more insights into customer behavior, optimizing business operations. A bunch of SEO-related features like easy canonicals customization, adding navigation pages to sitemap, and default smart and flexible category structure, help improve search performance and outrank SERP competitors.
Read More: Amasty’s Improved Layered Navigation Guide
Key Features Comparison: Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 and Amasty Improved Layered Navigation
Key Features | Mageplaza Layered Navigation (Ultimate) | |
Vertical and horizontal navigation | ✅ | ✅ |
Multiple filter values | ✅ | ✅ |
Attributes mapping | ✅ | ❌ |
Shop By' options | ✅ | ✅ |
Price slider | ✅ | ✅ |
Out-of-stock display | ✅ | ✅ |
Dependent filters | ✅ | ❌ |
All products page | ✅ | ✅ |
Advanced categories tree | ✅ | ❌ |
Expanding or hiding of filtering options | ✅ | ✅ |
Apply Filter button | ✅ | ✅ |
Product count | ✅ | ✅ |
Quick lookup | ✅ | ✅ |
Vertical scrolling | ✅ | ❌ |
From-to widget | ✅ | ❌ |
SEO-friendly URLs | ✅ | ✅ |
Custom metadata for filter results | ✅ | ✅ |
Custom URL alias | ✅ | ❌ |
Canonical URLs | ✅ | ❌ |
AJAX loading | ✅ | ✅ |
Infinite AJAX scroll | ✅ | ✅ |
Brands merchandiser | ✅ | ❌ |
Shop by Brand | ✅ | ✅ |
Navigation features
Both Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 and Amasty Improved Layered Navigation come with a bunch of navigation features:
Multi-select of filter options. Your customers can choose multiple values of product attributes, for example, blue and red colors or S and M sizes
Price slider. Users can set flexible price borders and find affordable products.
Vertical and horizontal navigation. You can place filters in a vertical or horizontal menu.
Advanced filter options. Your customers can use advanced filters like filters by ratings, new, sales, or in-stock products.
Out-of-stock display. You can choose to display or hide out-of-stock products on the filtering result page.
Expand or hide filtering options in the left menu by default.
SEO features
Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 and Amasty Improved Layered Navigation allow you to create SEO-friendly URLs that will not only be organized for better positions on SERP but also clear and easy for users. In addition, you can configure SEO attributes for the page with all products.
User experience features
These 2 extensions have mostly similar UX features, like:
AJAX loading page. After the user applies filters, the page doesn’t reload completely to show the results, but updates the product information only. This technology provides better website performance and speeds up the product selection process.
Scroll to the top after filtering. If you enable this feature in the backend, users will be redirected to the top of the page after they apply new filters.
The Apply Filter button. The Apply Filter button feature allows users to select all the filters they are interested in and then apply them.
Product count. Users can see the number of suitable products right next to each product attribute.
Quick lookup. Visitors can search for product attributes using the quick lookup tool.
Infinite-scroll. On the all-product page, users can scroll through the filtered products without pressing the Load More button, as new products are uploaded automatically.
Included extensions
As for the common included extensions, Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 and Amasty Improved Layered Navigation both have:
Shop by Brand. This module allows buyers to quickly find products by their favorite brands. Brand filters can be added to a store navigation panel and the Brands dropdown for the top navigation menu. Also, there is the “More from this brand” block that can be added to product pages together with brand logos and links.
Infinite Scroll. Infinite Scroll browses new products on demand when the user scrolls to the bottom of the list or when they click on “Load More”. So, new products appear without reloading the whole page.
Hyvä compatibility
Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 and Amasty Improved Layered Navigation both offer a Hyvä-ready storefront, so site owners do not have to worry about Hyvä theme compatibility issues.
Key Differences Between Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 and Amasty Improved Layered Navigation
Both Amasty Improved Layered Navigation and Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2offer rich functionality. They not only let e-commerce Magento 2 site owners provide their customers with smooth and stress-free shopping experiences, but also make even large websites with tons of products perform well in search results.
Yet, these modules are not equal. Below, you can see the key differences between Amasty Improved Layered Navigation and Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 in terms of UX, SEO, and other features that affect functionality and performance.
Advanced navigation
In addition to the common navigation features present in both modules, Amasty Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2 goes beyond and also offers advanced navigation, like:
5 filter display modes: labels, drop-down, images, images and labels, text swatches.
Dependent filters. You can configure dependencies between filters so that dependent filters will be shown if a user chooses the value of the main filter.
Attribute mapping. For example, having grouped all the shades of blue, you can show a user looking for blue sweatshirt results that include all the possible options.
Advanced categories tree. You can choose how subcategories will be displayed and enable a slider with subcategory images.
Canonical URLs
Amasty Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2 allows you to mark URLs as canonicals to avoid duplicate content on a Magento 2 website.
Mageplaza Layered Navigation doesn’t state this anywhere in the user guide or product page, so this could make the owners of large websites consider the potential problems with duplicate content issues and SERP position loss as a result.
Sitemap submission
Amasty Improved Layered Navigation lets site owners add custom Navigation Pages to the sitemap, which may speed up indexing and page loading times.
As a sitemap helps Google see the list of your pages and index them to later present in relevant search results pages, having your custom Navigation Pages indexed gives you the potential ability to get into SERPs for relevant queries. This can attract more site visitors who are likely to convert into paying customers.
UX Features
Improved Layered Navigation by Amasty has two additional characteristics that make it surpass Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2. These are:
Vertical scrolling with a search bar for filters with a long list of options.
Slider and the from-to widget for numeric attributes.
These features help provide easier navigation for big stores with vast filtering options, creating a seamless user experience and allowing customers to find what they need quickly and easily.
Promotion tools
Amasty Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2 extension includes the Brands Merchandise add-on. With this add-on, you can customize the product order on the brand pages to highlight specific products. This is a perfect option for brand product management for your marketing needs (promote new arrivals, highlight sales, showcase seasonal and occasional products, etc.) that allows you to position items either manually or automatically and customize each product list separately to meet multiple goals.
Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2 offers Advanced Ajax Search, which may help accomplish the same marketing goals but has limited functionality. With this tool, a Magento store can present 10 specific products in the dropdown when the user clicks on the search box. In doing so, store owners can stimulate sales of new arrivals and bestsellers. It doesn’t support creating and managing individual brand pages, only allowing a mixture of brands and items within those 10 products.
When to Choose Amasty Improved Layered Navigation Over Mageplaza Layered Navigation for Magento 2
Amasty Improved Layered Navigation for Magento 2 will be a perfect choice for your e-commerce business website if you have a big, multi-brand catalog and need it to be optimized for search performance, as well as for your customers. Choose Amasty if you:
need to provide site visitors with clear, user-friendly navigation.
want to avoid duplicate URLs for seamless search performance and not have a Google penalty issued to your site.
need to have your custom navigation pages indexed by Google.
have a wide range of filters that require dedicated scrolls and widgets for a comfortable site experience.
own a mutli-brand website with dedicated brand pages and need to manage them easily.
have subcategories and want to display them correctly.
need in-built product analytics for customer behavior studies.
already use (or plan to use) Amasty modules like Live Search and AI Content Generator Pro – they are fully compatible with Improved Layered Navigation.
To Sum It Up
Amasty and Mageplaza both offer sophisticated Layered Navigation functionality that greatly improves the performance and usability of Magento 2 websites. Both providers cover key navigational needs and functions, and both can be used to provide users with smoother shopping experiences.
Mageplaza may be an option for smaller websites with a smaller variety of brands and products. Amasty, in turn, may better suit merchants who own bigger, multi-brand stores and want a more scalable solution with visually simple navigation and e-commerce SEO peculiarities taken into account.
Make your decision based on your current business needs and growth plans to future-proof expansion with resources and technical capabilities.
