I was amazed and trust me, you’ll be too when you get to know that there are more or less 53 thousand plugins in WordPress so far. Being an open source platform, I think it’s quite normal for it to have a high number of plugins but 44000, that’s like an Amazon rainforest except for rain, obviously. But based on the authenticity and their utility, we can narrow down the flabbergasted amount of plugins to few of tens depending upon their features.

 

What are plugins?

 

WordPress is a platform to create your website, blog or an online store. By default, WordPress does its own way with all of these websites but there are independent apps that you can use to modify your website just like apps in the app store or play store which helps to make your phone more sophisticated. If you have a website in WordPress and one day you realize that you should upgrade it to an online store, then these plugins come handy. This is just an example of thousands. Here I present you, based on the tech-savvy guys around the world and the popularity among entrepreneurs,  the best WordPress plugins for 2018 categorically:

 

• Plugins for Search engine Optimization
• Plugins for e-commerce
• Plugins for security of your website
• Plugins for analytics
• Plugins for contact and forms builder
• Plugins for social sites sharing

Plugins for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Traffic for any website is what the blood is to the living body. It’s the ultimate desire of any site owner to generate maximum traffic in his/her site.  Based on the popularity among the users in WordPress, the best plugins for SEO are:

Yoast SEO

With 5 million-plus active user and seventeen thousand five star ratings, Yoast SEO helps you to increase the search optimization of your website in a way you cannot fathom. Though WordPress is itself a leader in SEO, Yoast SEO forces the blogger or you to write better content containing the keywords very popular in the virtual world.

All in one SEO pack

Among the tens of thousands of plugins today, AIOSEO, first created in 2007 stands out itself as one of the successful SEO plugins today. It is the only free SEO plugin which provides integration to e-commerce in WordPress. Also, it submits your sitemap and image XML sitemap to popular search engines like Bing and Google to increase the SEO.

Jetpack by wordpress.com

This plugin basically has every tool like SEO and traffic generator security and backup services, content creation, and not to forget the discussion and community service. Mostly the services provided are free which include Site stats and analytics and automatic sharing on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Reddit, and WhatsApp. In addition, it provides paid services of search engine optimization tool for google, bing, twitter, facebook and so forth. With 4 million active installations, this plugin is going spiral up.

Plugins for e-commerce

WordPress is one of the best platforms to host the online store, especially if you are trying for small scale with the minimum budget since WordPress is basically free. Furthermore, there are so many eCommerce plugins to increase the functionality of WordPress. But the best one for 2018 and beyond is, without a doubt, Woo-commerce.

Woocommerce

Built as a free e-commerce plugin for WordPress, Woo-commerce now powers more than 30% of online stores. I believe with its service to create a beautiful store with awesome graphics and weekly updates, this rate will go higher up. With its revolutionary features like worldwide shipping, extensive payment plan, total owner control and customization of the store and many more, woocommerce stands out one of the best if not the best plugin in the year to come.

Plugins for security

One of the major challenges in e-commerce is that anyone intelligent enough to exploit internet can create a trouble in your store posting the malicious content and hack your content. Don’t fret if you’ve created your store in WordPress because there are so many open sources and free security plugins to protect your site.

Akismet anti-spam

Akismet prevents your website from posting the malicious contents as it runs every comment posted by the users through it. Another interesting feature is it lets you see the comment it has deemed as spam ones. With 5 million and growing active installation its one of the plugins to make your site safe in 2018.

Wordfence Security

The name itself suggests the gravity of this plugin. With 65 % of the issues solved so far, it’s 100% free and open source plugin whose main purpose is WordPress security. Its firewall blocks complex and brute attacks, security scan alerts at the time of security breach. Additionally, the robust login security feature lets you protect your users’ identity.

 

Plugins for analytics

In order to optimize and analyze your website, web analytics is most. The best plugin for google analytics in 2018 will be google analytics for WordPress.

Google Analytics For WordPress

These plugins allow you to connect your website to google analytics directly without you having to pay someone else for it. It lets you visualize the relevant stats so that you can analyze the visitor’s rate and your website’s reality and room for improvement. Till date, 1 million website owners use this plugin actively.  You can get real-time stats, E-commerce and ad tracking with this plugin which will be of much help to you. Its beginner-friendly interface means it will be one of the most sought plugins in 2018.

 

Plugins for contact and forms builder

 

Obviously, you want your readers and users to have contact with you. Below, I discuss a couple of contact forms builders.

Contact form 7

It is hailed as one of the simplest and very useful plugins in WordPress to date because of its simplicity, ability to manage multiple forms, provision of customization of the form and so forth. Totally free, it supports Ajax-power submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet anti-spam etc. already five million users have been using it actively. So why not in 2018?

Ninja forms

This may be the game-changing plugin in the field of contact and forms builder as it provides access to beginner to create the quick and easy design without having to put any code. Also, for developers, it provides built-in hooks, filters, and custom field templates to modify the contact forms. Its gorgeous and intuitive user interface, and provision for unlimited forms, fields, emails etc. make it one of the plugins to look at in 2018.

 

Plugins for social site sharing

Though most of the SEO plugins offer social sites sharing features, there are few plugins solely dedicated to social sites sharing a purpose. But I think AddToAny share buttons is the one you’ll be looking for in 2018. 

AddToAny Share buttons

Like most of the SOE plugins out there, its main purpose is to generate the traffic to your website by engaging large audiences from the social media like facebook, twitter, Instagram, Reddit and 100 more sites. Created in 2006, its wide range of sharing options means there are a lot of ways to generate traffic to your website.

 

In addition to these plugins, there are so many WordPress plugins which are being developed every day for a specific purpose. Here, I have tried my best to present the most important and relevant plugins. Feel free to check https://wordpress.org/plugins/ for more.