Craft CMS has grown into the platform of choice for developers and agencies and it’s all due to its flexibility and extensibility through using Craft CMS plugins.

Basically, plugins are a powerful way of appending new functionality into your self crafted Craft CMS website. A plugin is a standalone element that acts as an add-on or extension to the core platform also it either extends the already added functionality or adds something that been missing from the core.

Having the right set of plugins, you can significantly enhance the functionality, efficiency, speed, security, and user-friendliness of your website. Luckily, some clear winners will benefit just about any type of site using Craft CMS.

Before adding any new plugins to your CraftCMS site, you need to keep certain factors in mind because the plugin you choose can, quite literally, make or break your site. So make sure you:

• You have a clear idea of the functionality you need.
• Is the plugin you want to use, is up to date, has technical support, and is maintained by the plugin team.
• What the number of active installs and reviews, as these two factors show the usability and benefits other users have got from the plugin.

For this post I went ahead and listed 15 Craft CMS plugins that you could have a more relaxed time extending the capabilities of your Craft powered projects.

1. Breadcrumb

This plugin will generate a simple breadcrumb array that you can style via Twig. It will generate crumb titles from the customFieldHandle setting if set, falling back to the title field. If none of these fields are present, it will generate the crumb title from the URL segment.

Breadcrumb works across different element types and is multisite friendly. It can even be used to generate BreadcrumbList schema.

Price: Free

2. Cage

This plugin provides a simple way to add an age-verification-gate to your website, where the user has to verify their age. It allows site administrators to have age-restricted sections on the website, where only adults can enter.

Price: Free

3. Craft Commerce

Craft Commerce is a powerful eCommerce platform built exclusively for Craft CMS, by the same folks who make it. It has a tight integration where you can manage your products, orders, promotions, and store settings right alongside all your web content, and relate products to entries and other content types.

It also has a world class localization so you can translate and localize your products for unlimited sites, languages, and locales, and define currency conversions to accept purchases in multiple currencies. You can even extend Commerce’s built-in functionality with dozens of integrations and a robust set of PHP APIs.

Price: $199.00 which includes 1 year of updates and $39.00 year per site for updates after that or pro at $999.00 includes 1 year of updates then $199.00 per site for updates after that.

4. Snaptcha

This Craft CMS plugin, Snaptcha is an invisible CAPTCHA that automatically validates forms and prevents spam bots from submitting to your Craft CMS site.

Snaptcha which stands for Simple Non-obtrusive Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart that will validate all POST requests to the front-end of your site, meaning that it will work with any form and any plugin.

Note that since this will affect all POST requests, you must add the required template tag before enabling validation.

Price: $29.00 includes 1 year of updates and $14.00 year per site for updates after that.

5. Formie

Formie is a Craft CMS plugin for creating user-friendly forms that your content editors will love. With over 25 fields available, a drag-and-drop form builder, multi-page support, and more!

Price: $99.00 includes 1 year of updates, then $49.00 per site for updates after that.

6. Guide

Craft CMS is intuitive. Marketing plans and organisational workflows not so much. Guide lets you create a CMS user manual within Craft CMS so clients don’t need to go far to get the answers they need.

Display your CMS manual within a Control Panel section, or on content edit pages, and in Dashboard widgets. The Guide Organiser shows you all of the guides in your CMS and makes it easy to move them from one place to another.

And even clients can also collaborate and contribute by editing guides right within Craft CMS. It has drag and drop components make it easy to write and edit guides in both Markdown and Twig formats.

Price: Free or Pro $49.00 includes 1 year of updates, then $25.00 year per site for updates after that.

7. Campaign

Campaign is an email marketing plugin. It aims to bring the distribution of content by email into the CMS, where we believe it should be, along with the same ethos of flexibility and user-friendliness that Craft does.

Price: Lite for $149.00  includes 1 year of updates. $49.00 year per site for updates after that. Or Pro $249.00 includes 1 year of updates $89.00 year per site for updates after that.

8. Messenger Customer Chat

Let people start a conversation on your site and continue in Messenger. Allows your customers to interact with your business anytime with the same personalised, rich-media experience they get in Messenger.

This plugin allows you to interact with your customers using Messenger by integrating it on your Craft website.

To see and reply to those messages, simply use the same messaging tools you use for your Facebook messaging, on desktop at facebook.com, Facebook Page Manager App (available on iOS and Android), or by adding your page account to Messenger.

Price: Free

9. SEOMate

SEOMate provides the tools you need to craft all your meta tags, sitemaps and JSON-LD microdata all in one highly configurable, open and friendly package, and with a super-light footprint.

This plugin aims to do less!, there’s no Control Panel settings or custom field-types. Instead, you configure everything from the plugin’s PHP config file, which makes it easy and quick to set up, bootstrap and version control your configuration.

All the data is pulled from your existing Craft fields, which makes for less maintenance over time, and keeps you in control of your data.

Price: Free

10. Vanilla Forums

The Vanilla Forums plugins allows you to have a Single Sign-On (SSO) integration with Craft CMS and Vanilla Forums so that means that Craft CMS’s login is used to auth. Then users are automatically signed in to Vanilla Forums without having to login in separately.

Price: Free

11. Remote Backup

Craft Remote Backup makes it easy to create off-site remote backups from the comfort of the Craft Control Panel. Along with a few CLI commands, this gives you the ability to take regular snapshots of your database and assets and rest assured that they are stored securely offsite.

Price: $29.00 includes 1 year of updates then $19.00 year per site for updates after that.

12. ImageOptimize

ImageOptimize allows you to automatically create & optimize responsive image transforms from your Craft 3 assets. It works equally well with native Craft image transforms, and image services like Imgix, with zero template changes.

Along with this plugin you use the native Craft UI/UX to create your image transforms, whether in the AdminCP or via your templates. ImageOptimize takes care of the rest, optimizing all of your image transforms automatically by running a variety of image optimization tools on them.

Price: $59.00 includes 1 year of updates. $29.00 year per site for updates after that.

13. Top Bar Call To Action

Top Bar CTA is the first Craft CMS plugin by BRIX Plugins, and it was created to help you easily add notification or call to action bars above your header menu. All with no code and no technical complexity.

Price: $29.00 includes 1 year of updates

14. Site Duplicate

Site Duplicate let’s you duplicate entries across Sites in Craft CMS. It even works when section entries aren’t set to propagate across site sections making it easy to duplicate entry data between Sites.

Price: Free

15. Videos

This plugin for Craft CMS allows you to connect to YouTube & Vimeo to explore or retrieve videos to use them in your website. Videos comes as a plugin that can be attached to any element supporting custom fields like Entries, Users, Categories.

Price: $99.00 includes 1 year of updates and $29.00 year per site for updates after that.