Though it’s one of the newest web browsers available, Chrome has quickly established its online dominance due in large part to its backing from tech juggernaut Google. But the factor that has earned Chrome millions of converts is its massive marketplace of optional extensions that allow each user to customize their online experience to make it more productive, convenient and efficient.
Businesses in particular can benefit from the hundreds of Chrome extensions available, which include standalone programs as well as extensions of existing products and software. These extensions can save large businesses millions of dollars that they would have otherwise spent developing a customized online presence, and smaller businesses can enjoy helpful widgets and shortcuts that they might not otherwise be able to afford.
While other browsers—including Firefox, Apple Safari and Microsoft Edge—offer some ability to customize the internet experience, none of them remotely approaches the wealth of options offered through Chrome.
Our Picks for the Best Chrome Extensions for Business
Although some Chrome extensions are specifically designed for certain business types and sizes, there are several dozen popular extensions that are universally useful to every business. The list below details the best Chrome extensions in a variety of categories, from extensions to maximize productivity to extensions that streamline online purchasing. Take a look and then start downloading.
Digital Wellness and Health
Most of us spend a substantial chunk of each day on our computers, and the strain it places on our physical health is undeniable. These Chrome extensions can help reduce the impact of long hours staring at the screen and scrolling through digital text.
Magnifying Glass
Online text can be frustratingly small and difficult to read, but you don’t want to spend precious time fumbling around in your settings to enlarge it, only to have to change it again on a different site. The Magnifying Glass extension places a built-in magnifier right into your browser.
Simply press Alt + Z and a digital magnifying glass will appear for you to move over the onscreen text that’s causing you trouble while leaving the rest of the page’s content unchanged. Once you’re done with it, just tap any key and the magnifying glass will disappear.
Dark Reader
Reading text on a computer screen for extended periods can cause major eye fatigue and even headaches. The Dark Reader extension provides your eyes with some welcome relief by converting your screen to “dark” mode, regardless of the design of the website. The extension darkens the background of the site to reduce the impact of the screen’s brightness on your eyes, and you can even customize the contrast, brightness, sepia filter and font settings to your preferences. It’s also fully open-source and ad-free.
Care Your Eyes
Many of us struggle to fall asleep at night despite being exhausted and sleep-deprived, and health experts attribute much of this problem to our late-night exposure to the bright lights of our computers and mobile devices. Fortunately, the Care Your Eyes extension can alleviate this unwanted effect by automatically transforming your screen into night mode when it gets close to bedtime. If you tend to work or surf late into the night, this extension is a must-have for your computer or tablet.
ECommerce Extensions
If your business sells its products or services online, you need to deliver the best possible digital shopping experience to your customers. These Chrome extensions can help you attract new buyers and keep them coming back for more.
Honey
This shopping extension is essential for online retailers. Honey automatically scours the internet for available discounts, coupons and promo codes and applies them to items in your customers’ carts. They save money with no additional effort required on their part, making them more likely to return to your site.
Keepa
If you sell products on Amazon, you’ll want to download the Keepa extension as soon as possible. This product alerts you about price reductions on any Amazon-operated sites, allowing you to stay ahead of competitors’ price changes without the time and energy of monitoring them manually. It also gives you access to pricing history of any product on Amazon sites, allowing you to forecast your own pricing more accurately.
Fakespot
Fakespot is another must-have extension for businesses who sell or source products online. The extension analyzes reviews of items on Amazon, Yelp and Walmart, flagging potential fakes with an A through F grading scale. Fakespot can help you avoid products whose quality may not reflect the information in their reviews as well as challenge potentially fraudulent reviews of your own products.
Security Extensions
Nearly every week, the news reports on another large-scale data breach or other cyberhacking incident, and businesses need to protect themselves and their customers from becoming victims. These Chrome extensions can help effectively safeguard the sensitive information on your site.
LastPass
Nearly every website requires an increasingly complex password these days, and many sites require you to change them frequently. This policy is highly effective in keeping your online information safe—that is, if you can keep track of the dozens of passwords you use on a regular basis.
With Lastpass, you no longer have to struggle to recall your passwords or risk writing them down somewhere; the app stores them all in one secure location so they’re right at hand when you want to log in. If you find yourself constantly having to reset your passwords because you can’t remember them, Lastpass is your solution.
Ghostery
This powerful, multifaceted extension does much more than just block ads and eliminate clutter, although it does that effectively too. Ghostery lets you see and block trackers on websites you visit, so you get to choose which sites collect your data. A robust anti-tracking feature even anonymizes your data for additional privacy protection.
The extension’s Smart Blocking feature automatically manages trackers to deliver faster load times and improved performance. You can also customize your display to show only information relevant to your needs and interests.
Click & Clean
As a businessperson, you’re probably online constantly, meaning your web cache and browsing history are probably packed, slowing down the speed and quality of your search results and other activities. With just a click or two, this powerful extension clears your web history, cache, cookies and temporary files. It also deletes client-side Web SQL databases, removes flash cookies and checks your computer for malware. Once Click & Clean does its work, you’ll be ready to start searching again in a safe and squeaky-clean digital environment.
Email Extensions
When you own or manage a business, the constant fire hose of emails into your inbox almost never stops, making it almost impossible to effectively manage your messages and increasing the risk that you’ll miss something important. The Chrome extensions below can help you reduce email chaos and the time you devote to dealing with it.
Hunter
Promoting your business requires constant proactive outreach, which is frequently best accomplished through email. However, targeted email communication requires a quality mailing list, which can be time-consuming and tedious to develop. With Hunter’s Domain Search function, one click on a website allows you to capture any email addresses, names, job titles and other contact information associated with that site. It also identifies the source of that information as well as the site’s standard email address conventions and department filters.
Boomerang
This potent email productivity tool empowers you to manage your incoming and outgoing messages to maximize efficiency and eliminate distractions. You can schedule a message to be sent at a later date or time and find out when it was opened with read receipts. The Inbox Pause feature functions like a snooze button for certain emails, so you won’t be constantly interrupted by alerts and notifications every time a new message hits your inbox.
It also reminds you to follow up if you haven’t received a reply to a message. Additionally, Boomerang integrates AI capability with “Respondable,” a digital assistant that analyzes the content of your email as you create it and predicts how likely you are to get a response, providing real-time tips for making your message more effective.
Inbox When Ready
Most of us have a tendency to check our email inboxes constantly throughout the day, a habit that can derail productivity and send us down a rabbit hole of responding, deleting and re-checking. The Chrome extension Inbox When Ready puts an end to the email madness by managing your access to your inbox, helping you to stay focused on critical tasks. The extension hides your inbox from view, so you can still search your archives and compose emails without being distracted by incoming messages.
You can also establish an inbox time budget for how frequently you want to check your inbox and how long you want to spend doing it; the extension provides graphic feedback for how closely you’re sticking to your budget. If you want to eliminate all distractions, you can even schedule an inbox lockout to prevent any temptation to check it before you’ve accomplished other tasks.
Social Media Extensions
Social media is key to establishing and expanding your business, but managing your accounts can be time-consuming. These Chrome extensions for social media help you share online content more effectively without sacrificing huge chunks of your day to do it.
Buffer
The Buffer extension makes it a snap to quickly share content to multiple social media platforms at the same time. You can immediately share content from other sources with just a click or schedule it for later sharing. It also makes it easier for visitors to your site to share your content with their networks and tracks the effect of your shares for valuable feedback on your social activity.
App for Instagram
This convenient Chrome extension allows you to manage your Instagram account from your computer. The extension opens in a new pop-up window to allow you to scroll, save and share content just as you would on the mobile app; once you close the window, no background activities continue, preventing any additional burden on your browser. If your business relies heavily on Instagram for generating buzz and promoting products, App for Instagram is a must-have extension.
RiteBoost
RiteBoost instantly enhances your social media reach by automatically adding relevant hashtags, images, emojis and GIFs to your posts. It identifies trending hashtags and other modifiers to ensure more users see your content, so you spend less time trying to figure out which keywords and emojis will catch the most eyes.
Content Extensions
When it comes to the online presence of your business, content creation and distribution is likely the single most important activity you engage in. Unfortunately, it can also be the most time-consuming—and the most difficult thing to get right. These Chrome extensions will help you develop, distribute and analyze high-quality content to boost your business.
Grammarly
Long beloved by students, Grammarly has also made a splash in the corporate world by helping professionals ensure that their emails, web content and social media posts are concise, compelling and free from spelling and grammatical errors—all of which can be major turn-offs to new and existing customers. The Grammarly extension works in real time as you type, flagging mistakes and clunky phrasing and offering corrections and improvements to help you make the best possible impression on your readers.
A new tone-detecting feature even helps you predict how your message might come across to readers, allowing you to tailor your words to more accurately reflect their intent. It’s also compatible with most common text-based programs, including Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress and many more.
BuzzSumo
This clever extension allows you to see the social engagement metrics for any web page, including shares, likes and upvotes on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest as well as backlinks on blogs and other pages. It also reveals who is sharing the content along with basic information about the content’s original creator.
MozBar
The MozBar extension is the ultimate resource for SEO, delivering real-time data on any page or search engine results page (SERP). With this convenient tool, you can create custom searches based on a wide range of parameters, instantly identify the page and domain authority of a site, compare link metrics between pages within a SERP and view page elements, attributes, markup and HTTP status. When you’re done with your research, the MozBar will export your SERP analysis to a CSV file for later use.
Organization-Focused Extensions
Small business owners are consummate multitaskers, but it can be challenging to juggle multiple tasks while working online. These Chrome extensions can help you stay motivated, manage your to-do list and keep track of important files and tasks.
Momentum
With Momentum installed on your computer, opening a new tab in Chrome will reveal your customized daily dashboard featuring an inspiring photo and related motivational quote along with the daily weather forecast and space for you to set an intention for the day, jot down a to-do list, prioritize your time and more. The extension has been lauded by productivity guru Tim Ferriss as well as Buzzfeed, Lifehacker and Reddit, so you know it’s worth adding to your browser.
Evernote Web Clipper
This Chrome add-on makes it easy to save and file online content, including news articles, photos, bits of code and almost anything else you want to reference in the future. Instead of cluttering your Favorites tab with dozens of disorganized links to search through later, Evernote Web Clipper lets you clip any webpage, highlight the key parts, annotate the content, take screenshots and save it all to your Evernote account for convenient retrieval.
It’s no surprise that more than 15 million users rely on Pocket to quickly save online content to a single location. This time-saving Chrome extension won the Webby Award for Best Productivity App in 2014, and its functionality has only expanded since.
Instead of saving tabs in Chrome or emailing yourself dozens of links, use Pocket to file videos, articles, recipes and more in one place. You can access the content anytime from your phone, tablet or computer, even if you’re offline. It also lets you share items to social media, email or even a fellow Pocket user’s account.
Productivity Extensions
We’d all love to have more hours in the day—especially busy business owners—and while these productivity extensions for Chrome can’t actually give you more time, they can definitely help you use it more effectively and efficiently.
Asana
The Asana Chrome extension is designed to work in tandem with the broader team productivity app, allowing you to add tasks, track your work and communicate with teammates from any web page. With the extension installed in your browser, you’ll be able to insert tasks directly into any project, add a task description, assign tasks to teammates and even add the current website as a task so you can save it for later or share it with the team.
Todoist
This wildly popular online task manager has a fan base of more than 20 million users who rely on it to stay organized online. The Chrome extension makes it simple to add websites as tasks (such as adding an article to your reading list or saving a product to your shopping list), plan your daily schedule, complete and mark tasks as finished and more—all without leaving the browser.
Toggl Button
The Toggl Button extension helps you literally manage your time, adding a timer to online tools like Asana, Google Drive and Salesforce to track how long you spend on each site and identify areas for improving your productivity. If you find yourself spending too much time in one program or site—or simply not getting enough done during your work day—Toggl Button can get you back on track to accomplishing your goals.
Our Final Thoughts on Chrome Extensions
With thousands of extensions available for Chrome, it can be challenging to figure out which ones can truly benefit your business pursuits and which ones aren’t worth the time they take to download. While this list is far from comprehensive—there are plenty of excellent extensions not mentioned here—you can be confident that the ones described above will deliver on their promises to enhance your online productivity, the quality of your work product and even your overall physical and mental well-being.