Best Blogging Extensions for Google Chrome (and Other Browsers)

Here is a list of the best Google Chrome extensions for all sorts of bloggers out there. Trust me on this: these free extensions will make your life a whole lot easier when it comes to blogging tasks on a daily basis.

(Note that most of these extensions are for the Google Chrome browser, but many of the popular ones are also available for other major browsers. If not, there are almost always alternatives available out there for browsers other than Chrome.)

1. Evernote Web Clipper

This little extension has, in all seriousness, been a life-saver for me during my blogging exploits all these years!

Often times, we stumble upon a website, a link, an article or a news item that interests us in one way or the other – but most of the times, it is because we, as bloggers, might want to use it later on as a post idea, or post on it later, or use it as a reference resource when writing our next blog post. That is where Evernote Web Clipper comes in really handy.

This extension allows you to save the link for later use. Saving a link is as simple as dragging-and-dropping the link onto the extension’s icon and voila! Saved for later reference.

2. AddThis

AddThis allows you to share your content on popular social mediums and directories such Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, Tumblr and Delicious, to name just a few. There are more than 300 websites on the extension’s list!

The extension makes sharing your content on these website easy as anything. You can share not only your own content, but just about anything on the internet through the extension. Furthermore, the extension also lets you bookmark, print and/or translate webpages.

3. Wordpress Stats

In simple terms, this extension does exactly what it claims to do: provide you with Wordpress statistics of all your Wordpress blogs right from inside the browser.

You get detailed information and stats like referrers, top posts and top search queries; all information that is available to you from within Wordpress, but with this, you can access it without the need to log into your blog and going into the dashboard.

4. SEO For Chrome

This is yet another great tool, real handy for checking just about anything and everything related to SEO on your website.

Simply type in your URL and this extension will provide you with a ton of information about your website’s SEO – such as pagerank, traffic levels, and pages indexed by Google and other search engines.

There is a ton of additional information available as well -  such as backlinks, search statistics, social metrics and on-site SEO metrics as well. A must-have extension for any blogger out there!

5. Ruul Screen Ruler

A real handy tool for when you want to measure something on your screen, Ruul Screen Ruler is a virtual foot-ruler that allows you to measure anything on your screen.

You can measure the size of images, the size of the content area of a webpage, or just about anything else on the screen.

6. Sniphr

Simply put, Sniphr allows you to save snippets of text from any webpage or from just about anywhere on the internet. Simply highlight the text, and save it as a snippet. Probably the best time-saving tool out there, and one of the simplest bookmarking extension on Chrome.

7. Diigo

Diigo functions in a way similar to AddThis, except that it allows you to do much more than simply bookmark webpages and articles.

Diigo lets you bookmark anything off the internet, highlight stuff on websites, put up reminders for yourself, pool your findings and if you want, share them. It is the perfect tool for researching for your blog, and all-in-one tool for doing research and getting things done.

8. Ly

A product of the famous service bit.ly (a famous URL shortening service), Ly lets you shorten your URLs to the smallest, most compact size possible. This means that Ly makes sharing URLs extremely simple and straightforward.

Short URLs are useful when you want to be able to share with them via email, verbally, or over social mediums such as Facebook, or perhaps most importantly, Twitter (due to its 160-character word limit).

The extension therefore makes it easier to shorten the URLs without the need to go through the bit.ly website.

9. The Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search

Almost all bloggers use images in form or the other on their blogs, and the simple fact of the matter remains that finding the right images takes a lot of time. In addition, finding free-to-use images becomes an issue as well.

That is where The Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search extension comes in. This extension lets you look up half-a-billion free stock photos from over 200 galleries, saving you an immense amount of time and effort that you would’ve otherwise spent scouring the internet look for these images.

Bloggers who require images for their posts very frequently will absolutely love this extension!

10. SEO SERP

SEO SERP is  w wonderful tool, in the sense that it gives bloggers an insight into their Google ratings, and how exactly their websites are doing in terms of keywords. This means that you can check the position of a single website, or a single website, for a given keyword, and keep  a record of the progress your blog is making.

11. Thesauraptor

This has been, for me, a genuine life-saver throughout the years! As you might (or might not) have guessed, thesauraptor is a thesaurus extension for Google Chrome, that lets you find alternatives to the words you might be looking for, from right within the browser.

The extension is quick and immensely useful when you run out of words, or just want an alternative word for saying what you really want to say. It lets you find replacement words easily and instantly.

12. Live Earnings Checker Google AdSense

As if it wasn’t obvious enough from the name, Live Earnings Checker is a Google Chrome extension, that lets you know the amount of your earnings through Google AdSense. It keeps you updated with AdSense statistics throughout the day, as the extension updates the information every 5 minutes. You can view AdSense earnings by day or month, as well as convert your earnings in different currencies.

Needless to say, this is a great extension for all those bloggers out there that might be using AdSense.

13. Wordcount

This is something that should probably come with browsers as a default. Wordcount, as the name probably gives it away, gives you a count of the words and characters of just about anything that you select on your screen, as simple as that!

14. Google Reader Notifier

If you rely on feeds from many different sources as a part of your blogging routine, I strongly recommend using Google Reader Notifier with your Google Reader.

Google Reader, as we all might know, if a popular Feed reader, and once  this extension has been configured with Google Reader, it will display all your Google Reader unread feeds right in your browser. The extension’s icon (which in Google Chrome, sits next to the URL bar) shows the number of unread feeds, clicking on this icon brings up a preview of all your unread feeds in a popup window.

Pretty simple to use, as well as being immensely useful!

15. YSlow

YSlow extension for Google Chrome analyzes a webpage for speed, and suggests ways in which the speed of the page can be improved and made better.

YSlow uses a certain set of rules and criteria and takes some of the most quick-loading websites out there as benchmark, and puts your website against them. Once it analyses your website, it assigns it a grade based on its performance in terms of speed, and comes up with suggestions on how this can be improved.

A brilliant little extension for your blogs and websites!