Best Security Chrome Extensions HTTPS Everywhere Click&Clean J2Team Security Ghostery Checkbot Avast Online Security FlowCrypt Fair AdBlocker Users: 2.1 million "HTTPS" is a website protocol that ensures a site is secure before you visit it. The tool protects you from malware as well as distracting ads and pop-ups. Chrome Extensions for Social Media Users: 447 thousand This extension lets marketers quickly and easily shorten links and share them on social media directly from their browser. Users: 177 thousand Check My Links does what it says it will: It quickly scans web pages and shows you which links are working properly and which are broken. Users: 2 thousand Impactana's Chrome toolbar offers a wealth of SEO, social media, and content marketing information about any web page. Best New Tab Chrome Extensions OneTab Momentum Blank New Tab Page Infinity New Tab Start.me Earth View Infinite New Tab New Tab URL Redirect Changer Plus Users: 1.9 million When you conduct research for a piece of content, it's easy to get swamped in multiple open tabs with great resources you want to cite. Users: 73 thousand With Start.me, you turn each new tab you open in Chrome into a personal dashboard. Users: 9 thousand Got a website you always need to have open? Instead of saving content to another application or document, you can save it directly to your HubSpot software for easy reference when you sit down to write a blog post or web page. Users: 503 thousand Manually bookmarking websites can sometimes be a tedious process, so Google created this extension to organize websites you want to save without having to open a new tab.
For all of the greatness that the internet affords — cute animal videos, GIFs, and interesting blogs — one of its biggest downsides is how distracting it can be. How many times have you sat down to work and been pulled into a pit of procrastination?
Perhaps you get absorbed in updates on social media, or maybe you click through Wikipedia trying to determine what exactly Gina Rodriguez’s first TV role was (it was on Law & Order). No matter where you click online, it’s easy to be pulled into a black hole of distraction and low productivity.
Enter Google Chrome browser extensions. The Google Chrome web store offers a variety of different tools that help you become safer, smarter, and more productive with just one click.
We can’t guarantee that these extensions will make YouTube videos less tempting to watch, but we recommend them for busy marketers who want to make their time online more efficient. We’ve broken them down into different categories if you want to jump ahead:
Please note: All of these are free tools, but some of the services that they work with have paid features or subscriptions.
Best Security Chrome Extensions
- HTTPS Everywhere
- Click&Clean
- J2Team Security
- Ghostery
- Checkbot
- Avast Online Security
- FlowCrypt
- Fair AdBlocker
Users: 2.1 million
“HTTPS” is a website protocol that ensures a site is secure before you visit it. And although you might recognize this tag at the beginning of most websites, it’s not quite ubiquitous across the internet — nor does it guarantee that the site you’re browsing is 100% secure.
The Chrome extension, HTTPS Everywhere, rewrites the request you send to any website you want to visit in Chrome so you can be sure your browser produces the secure version of that site. Browse assured that all your personal information is kept safe and your computer doesn’t catch malware while you’re online.
See how this browser extension looks in the screenshot below.
Users: 3.4 million
If you’re constantly searching and downloading work material during the day, it can be a tedious task to clear your browser history. You just don’t have the time to keep pulling up your history page and manually clearing your cache or download log.
The Click&Clean extension for Chrome allows you to clear your cache, URL searches, website cookies, and download history with a single click of a button on your browser toolbar. The extension can also scan your computer for viruses and clean up your hard drive of unused applications — helping your computer run faster as a result.
Users: 164 thousand
J2TEAM Security isn’t your average firewall. This Chrome extension starts with basic virus protection, but also allows you to customize your website blocklist and ensure your Chrome browser uses the “HTTPS” security tag on blogging sites — preventing you from visiting user blogs that are deemed unsafe.
The extension also offers a variety of Facebook-specific privacy settings, such as blocking the “seen” tag after you read certain private messages and hiding how long you’ve been active in Facebook Messenger.
Users: 2.7 million
Ghostery is a sophisticated ad-blocking extension designed to remove ads that distract or interrupt you while you’re viewing specific website content. It also disguises your browsing data so ad-tracking tools are unable to collect personal information that you’d prefer to keep private. These features help to speed up webpages’ load time and ultimately improve your browsing experience.
Users: 15 thousand
Checkbot combines technical SEO with modern security to help you analyze both how safe and how optimized a website is for search engines. Because search engines like Google prioritize website security in addition to content quality in their rankings, this Chrome extension is a handy one-two punch for content creators and web developers.
Checkbot can test the page speed, SEO, and overall security of more than 250 URLs per domain for free — and help you improve in these three categories to protect you and you website visitors from unsafe material.
Users: 10+ million
Avast Online Security is known as a “web reputation plugin,” examining each individual website you visit for suspicious information. The extension also warns you if the site you’re visiting simply has a bad reputation. In turn, you can rate the websites you visit to help Avast get better at flagging potentially unsafe webpages while on Chrome.
Users: 45 thousand
This security extension is specific to emails, allowing you to send and receive encrypted emails (and attachments) to and from your colleagues. It’s one of the best ways to be sure your emails are kept private and secure while in transit to the recipient.
FlowCrypt uses PGP encryption, which stands for “Pretty Good Privacy” — the standard for encryption in most email clients. The tool integrates perfectly with Gmail, adding a “Secure Compose” button to your inbox.
Users: 2.1 million
Fair AdBlocker offers both malware and adware in one browser extension. The tool protects you from malware as well as distracting ads and pop-ups. Once installed, you can configure your blocking settings to hide the types of ads you’re least interested in seeing — especially those that carry dangerous information that can infect your computer.
Chrome Extensions for Social Media
Users: 447 thousand
This extension lets marketers quickly and easily shorten links and share them on social media directly from their browser. This is particularly useful for social media marketers and allows for personalization with an Enterprise plan.
Users: 20 thousand
BuzzSumo provides insight into how content is performing. When you’re on a web page, click the extension to show metrics such as the number of social shares and backlinks to a piece. This tool provides an easy way to see how much engagement your content is generating. You could also use BuzzSumo to perform competitor analysis to uncover strategies that might make your content more shareable.
Users: 10+ million
This extension allows you to easily save items onto your Pinterest boards without navigating away from what you’re doing. What’s neat about this tool is that it shows you multiple pinnable items available on each website so you can save more than one item to your board at a time. (Normally, you would have to click into each blog post or image in order to separately pin each to your boards individually.)
Users: 2.4 million
Facebook’s new “Save” feature lets users aggregate links, images, and videos they find on Facebook in one location in their account. This bookmark allows you to do the same from anywhere on the web, making Facebook a centralized place to save content you’re interested in checking out later. (As you can see, in addition to inbound marketing, I’m also interested in learning more about footwear and vegan recipes.)
Users: 22 thousand
RiteTag shows you how hashtags are performing on Twitter and Facebook before you post content. Once you log in to RiteTag using your Twitter or Facebook credentials, it checks the hashtags you begin typing in real time and color codes them:
- If your hashtag is green, it means the hashtag will help your content be seen now.
- If your hashtag is blue, it means the hashtag will help your content be seen over time.
- If your hashtag is gray, you should select a new hashtag because it has low levels of engagement.
- If your hashtag is red, you should select a new hashtag because it’s so popular, your content will disappear into the crowd.
Users: 1 thousand
If you’re following a hashtag or event on Twitter, you may want to make a list of users tweeting about topics you’re interested in, which is time-consuming to do manually. With the List Builder for Twitter, you can navigate to a hashtag or trending topic and build a list of all users tweeting, or you can select which users you want to add to a list. Here’s an example of the tool in action: I built a list of all users tweeting “#INBOUND16” during…
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