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Drupal is a very powerful CMS out of the box but the core basic installation lacks some key features that you’re probably going to need to take your Drupal site to the next level.

Here’s a quick list of five Drupal modules you should install and learn how to use.

Google Analytics Drupal Module

This module is simple but very necessary if you plan to use the free Google Analytics tracking software. It puts the code at the bottom of every page, as well as let you control which pages are tracked. It’s a must have if you don’t want to waste time editing template files manually.

Download the Google Analytics Module here

XML Sitemap Drupal Module

Every website needs a dynamically generated XML sitemap in order to keep the relevant search engines updated about the latest content on your site. You can manually create a sitemap to do this, but it’s best to have something that is integrated with Drupal to ensure that your site is crawled by the search engines as easily as possible. You can also control what is and it not included in the sitemap and thus what is and is not crawled by the search engine bots.

Download the XML Sitemap Module here

CCK – Drupal Content Construction Kit Module

This module is so important that it’s being integrated into the Drupal core for the next major version of Drupal. CCK allows you create custom content. What does that mean? You can customize the types of pages that your site will have and fields they contain. It’s very powerful and very necessary tool to have.

Download the CCK Module here

Views – Content Display Module

Views is another hugely important modules that being integrated in to the Drupal core. In a nutshell Views allows you to control the way content is displayed and viewed by the end user. For example, if you needed to create a table of all your pages showing titles, descriptions, creation date, etc you can do this with Views. But it does so much more than this. Views is incredibly powerful and incredibly difficult to learn how to use. But it’s very much worth learning how to use.

Download the Views Module here

Global Redirect Drupal Module

You’ll need this module because of the way permalinks work in Drupal. When you turn on Clean URL’s in Drupal, this basically creates copies of all your content. You’ll have the actual PHP messy links and the clean url links. This will trigger duplicate content problems with the search engines who will think there are two versions of each page. This simple plugin will create redirects from the old pages to the new pages so that bots will only think there is one page. This is a must have module.

Download the Global Redirect Module here

What Drupal modules would you recommend putting on a new Drupal website?