Top 10 Drupal Modules For Drupal 8/9

The administration module is always our first choice when creating a new Drupal site. It allows you a much faster access to every admin page.

Each section of your Drupal site can be reached directly with only a click on the menu item.

Without Admin Toolbar module, you have to click several times to come to a specific page in your Drupal site.

It speeds up navigating your pages.

Metatag is a must module. The whole SEO of your Drupal site depends on this module. With this module, you can set up global meta tags for your content. When you enable it, it will allow you to add set-up page title, description, and keywords for your content. 

It can automatically insert meta descriptions by taking a snippet of your text in your content and using it as a meta description. But much better you can manually write it yourself, which is very important for search engines. 

It also has several sub plugins, that you can enable. These include:

• Facebook's Open Graph, 
• Twitter Cards and 
• Dublin Core via included submodules
• Google Plus metatags
• Pinterest metatag

The Pathauto module automatically crates URL paths for your content. It can be easily set up to create a url pattern for nodes, taxonomy, users, and terms automatically when you save the content. 

Who wants to have the old style of URLs on the site, for example,/node/31 becomes  /seo-best-tips. Nice-looking URLs with keywords inside are very important for SEO. This is just another element where you can show search engines what is your content about.

You can set up aliases for each type of node with patterns. 

For general content you can set up the alias [node:title], this will automatically set the url of your content as your title.

Redirect is an essential Drupal module. When you start using the Pathauto module, you have 2 URLs for each content node. You have for example /node/32   and   /drupalmodules which both point to the same content article. You can access same article with both URLs. In Google, you can get duplicate content, which can be a real problem regarding your rankings. What Redirect does is it automatically hard redirects to a friendly URL immediately.  /node/32   gets redirected immediately to /drupalmodules article. That solves the problem of duplicate content. 

In the settings as you can see you can enforce clean URLs. Redirect module is an essential SEO module for drupal. 

You can also redirect specific URLs with 301 redirects. In case you update the article and change the URL you can redirect it to new path. In this case if somebody comes from old search result in google that still points to old URL, he will be redirected to new URL automatically and the user will not see 404 error of blank page, that happens when you change URL of the article.

Linkit gives you the possibility to quickly create internal or external links inside your WYSIWYG content editor (CKE editor by default) and link to them.

The huge advantage of this module is that it autocompletes the URL path of the linked item. You can start typing the keywords that are in the title of specific article in your Drupal site and linkit will automatically find that content and link to it. That saves you a lot of time because you do not have to search for specific internal content URL and copy the url, it automatically searches for that content based on the keywords you type in the linkit field. 

You can easily link to nodes, users, taxonomy terms, and comments with this module.

All the settings are done under text formats 

/admin/config/content/formats    where you need to add small thumb to your editor and enable linkit, check image below.

Webform is another must-have module. With webform, you can create all kinds of simple or advanced forms. The beauty of this module is that it can be very advanced, you can create custom forms based on conditional logic, the behavior of the user. Like I said it can be used to create a simple contact form for example or a form that is very advanced. 

You can create multi-page forms, and multi-column forms. It uses flexbox so your forms will be mobile friendly of course. 

This module allows you to customize each part of the form. You can use specific fields, or conditional fields. It is such a wonderful module, but you will need a little time to get familiar with it. There are also some demos included that you can modify and make your own. That helps a lot. 

This theme module will automatically create a sitemap for your Drupal-based website, which will be useful for search engine optimization. Each site should have a sitemap. Sitemaps generated by the module adhere to recent Google norms for multilingual content by creating hreflang sitemaps and image sitemaps. Google bots will thank you for it later.

Do not forget to enable sitemap for each type of content. If you do not do that, the module will do nothing. 

Visit content type and enable sitemap like in picture below:

Drupal module Honeypot utilizes the honeypot method and the timestamp informed by method to prevent spam bots from filling out forms on your Drupal site. Without a spam module on your site, you will get hundreds of spam emails, and comments per day. Honeypot detects these automatic submissions and stops them. When it detects that a spam bot tries to fill out one of your forms, it stops the process immediately. The result is that the spam bot can´t submit the form with fake spam data.

These methods defeat many spambots and are not as disruptive for your visitors as CAPTCHAs or other methods or spam detection. They work in the background without the user even knowing it.

For one, this module still lets at the very least a small amount of spam through. I suggest additionally utilizing the Antibot Drupal module (which is our next suggested module) in conjunction with Honeypot, to really prevent spam at its source.

Antibot is a lightweight Drupal module designed to automatically remove all spam robotic submissions on your site. It works with minimal intervention and doesn't require any of the customers' participation.

The only obligation that the user must do is to make sure that JavaScript is enabled in their browsers. Without JavaScript enabled, this module will not work. If they don't, a message will appear asking them to enable JavaScript in order that they can use the form.

All major browsers use JavaScript, but some users still use special so called anonimous browsers which have the JS disabled for security and tracking purposes. 

But they will get an alert if that is the case and they can swith broweser easily to fill and submit one of your forms. 

From my experience this module is bulletproof. I have it installed on on of my Drupal 7 sites for over 10 years. I did not get not even 1 spam comment or email in that time.

This is the only Drupal module from our list that is in the core. That means it is already installed by default, you just need to enable it in the modules section. 

It is not that easy to use but you will learn quickly. 

With it, you can create multi-column content, similar to Elementor in WordPress. The great thing about it compared to WordPress Elementor, is that it does not speed down your site. Your Drupal site will still be fast. 

I am personally using it when I want to spice up the design of my content. Instead of having one column standard article, I can insert the 50/50 size columns at the top or the bottom of each content and make my article nicer. 

If the Drupal theme is not supporting this module regarding the CSS, you can easily write some additional CSS based on flexbox for example to make this module really shine.