10 Free Chrome Extensions for Getting Work Done
Wade Foster / January 23, 2014
The internet loves to talk about mobile and web apps, but there's one utility that doesn't get as much credit as it should—Chrome extensions.
Good use of a Chrome extension can take a product from interesting to essential. Here are 10 free Chrome extensions I use every day to get more work done.
The Buffer Chrome extension is what makes this social media sharing tool extra valuable for me. If I'm reading an article I like and think it would be of interest to my followers, the extension lets me quickly click to share the content on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. It also allows me to schedule it to be shared later so I don't share too many items with my followers at once.
During the course of the day, I often come across articles that I find interesting and would definitely like to read. Over time, I noticed that I'd read a bunch of those articles right away and get distracted from important activity at hand. The Pocket Chrome extension solves that issue. With one click, I can save the article to read later when I've actually set aside some time to read. Instant productivity win!
LastPass solves the password problem. Whether it's for an account just for me or an account for one of the hundreds of services we use at Zapier, LastPass makes sure that I can always log in to the service and not have to chase down credentials. On top of that, it helps make sure we use strong passwords for all our logins. This is one extension no one should be without.
Throughout the day I'm constantly evaluating potential partners for Zapier. Unfortunately, it can sometimes be hard to figure out just how much traction a company might have. If I had infinite time, I'd work with them all, but I don't so I need a way to quickly evaluate how effective partners might be.
The PageRank Status Chrome extension lets me instantly see the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and a handful of other quick stats to see how much traction a company might have. This is helpful for separating the merely interesting from the potentially great partners.
I'm obsessive about the real estate on my screen and ads take up valuable space that could be used by something more important.
AdBlock makes sure ads get out of my way and lets me focus on the content that matters.
The Hangouts extension is the best way for me to stay in touch with my teammates. The default Google Talk app is relegated only to inside Gmail. The Hangouts Chrome extension docks Hangout chats at the bottom of your screen and can overlay all your other windows when you get a new chat from someone. A great way to make sure you don't accidentally ignore a teammate all day simply because you haven't checked your Gmail tab.
Momentum is one of those that seems fun at first and then you realize just how awesome it is. Momentum replaces your default new Chrome tab page with a beautiful new nature photo daily and asks you one question: "What is your main focus today?"
It's effective simply because it reminds you constantly throughout the day what your main focus should be. And you start to realize just how often you look at that new Chrome tab. It's pretty valuable real estate and Momentum helps you do something very useful with it.
As a remote team, it's not often that we get to see each other in-person. So one of the best ways to have fun virtually is through GIFs. But finding the perfect GIF quickly is often more time consuming than it should be. In those cases, Giphy has your back.
The Giphy Chrome extension lets you search Giphy from your Chrome toolbar, so when you need that reaction GIF right away, you're all set.
Signals is a Chrome extension from the team at HubSpot. The extension helps you track when people are opening, reading and clicking on links in the email you send. It's a great tool for press, blogger, sales or biz dev outreach because you can get a sense for which people are interacting with your emails.
Even better, they let you turn tracking on and off for emails. That way you don't have to track on for emails where it's unnecessary. Signals was quite helpful when trying to generating press for the new Zapier Developer Platform.
I recently stumbled across Campalyst and it's hands down the best tool I've found for analyzing Twitter traffic in Google Analytics. Instead of flying blind on who is sending you Twitter traffic, Campalyst embeds the tweet inside Google Analytics so I can see exactly which people are driving traffic to Zapier and how well it converts.
This is great information for informing us what Twitter influencers we should be aiming to form a deeper relationship with. For instance, based on the tweet above you can see that Howard Lindzon sent 54 visitors with one tweet and five of those converted to users. That's a pretty good conversion rate.
These are 10 Chrome extension I love. What are some of your favorite Chrome extensions?
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Wade Foster is a Co-founder and CEO at Zapier. He likes to write about process, productivity, startups and how to do awesome work.
