10 Essential Drupal Contrib Modules every Website Should Have

Having experience with Drupal for over 5 years, I wanted to share my thoughts on what essential Drupal contributed modules that I love to have in my sites. These modules help me not just with site development, but also management, SEO, and more! But first, let me explain what Drupal is, what and how the community contributes to its module system, and then what contributed modules I personally recommend.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that empowers individuals and organizations to build and manage robust websites, ranging from personal blogs to enterprise-level applications. With its flexible architecture, extensive module ecosystem, and active community support, Drupal is renowned for its scalability, security, and versatility. It enables users to create highly customizable and feature-rich websites tailored to their specific needs, making it an ideal choice for businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, and non-profit organizations. Drupal's significance lies in its ability to provide a powerful platform for developing dynamic and engaging web experiences while offering the flexibility to adapt and evolve with changing requirements and technologies.

Drupal Modules: Extending and Enhancing!

The ecosystem of Drupal modules is vast and diverse, comprising thousands of contributed modules developed and maintained by the Drupal community. These modules play a crucial role in extending Drupal's core functionality, enabling users to add new features, enhance existing ones, and tailor their websites to meet specific requirements. Some of the key aspects of Drupal modules are that they offer customization and flexibility, it is community contributed / community driven as well as accessibility and security requirements by Drupal.org itself, and gives the ability to integrate with third party services.

You can find the official Drupal modules at Drupal.org. There, you can search for nearly any module to help extend and enhance your Drupal development to meet your needs, whether its building a simple blog website, or a complex, multi-site Drupal ecosystem.

10 Must-Have Contrib Modules

So, now knowing a little a bit about Drupal and its modules, here are my 10 personal contrib modules that I would recommend:

1. Pathauto - Automatically creates SEO-friendly URL's for content. You can even specify patterns for different content types, taxonomies, media, and more.
2. Admin Toolbar - This module helps make the Drupal administrative toolbar easier to work with, as well as give you an easy way of clearing the different types of Drupal cache.
3. CTools - This module is mostly a set of API's and tools that help the developer experience. Some of these tools include easy plugin implementation, form tools, and object caching.
4. Easy Breadcrumb - Allows expand the core breadcrumb system and make changes that can follow paths better, either by URL, by menu, or more.
5. Metatag - An amazing module that helps autocomplete necessary Metatags for your website. You can fully customize what metatags, you want, how they should be filled, based on what kind of content, and more.
6. Google Tag - Makes it easy to enable the Google Tag Manager and even set parameters on where the G-Tag should show up on your site.
7. Media Entity Download - A great module to allow the ability to offer a download media plugin for a media entity, without having to specifically go to the filename itself. This makes it easier to update and replace a media entity file without having to update relative URL's pointing to the file.
8. Twig Tweak & Twig Field Value - I'm putting both of these modules together as they help enhance your frontend development. With these modules, theme development and accessing values from twig are easier to accomplish.
9. Linkit - This module helps enhance your WYSIYWG experience by providing an autocomplete interface to help link to content, media, taxonomies, and more.
10. Webform - This extremely powerful module provides you with a comprehensive way of developing forms for your website to collect data. You can build something simple like a contact form to a full multi-step form process that sends data to third party sources.

There are many, many other Drupal modules that I have found very useful, but these are my top 10 that I use constantly on many of the Drupal projects that I have worked on.