The best WordPress plugins of 2018

A SEO plugin should be available as a standard with any WordPress project. Nowadays, even hobby bloggers are aware that their site will only be read if users are quickly able to find it on Google. Yoast SEO is one of the best WordPress plugins for improving a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. There are many free alternatives, though, such as WP Meta SEO. With this plugin, you can influence the most important aspects of on page optimization directly from the WordPress backend. Not only are users able to edit titles and meta-descriptions with these tools, they’re also able to manage internal links and permalinks, and make use of XML sitemaps. Find more SEO tips for your WordPress blog here.

Every blogger looks forward to high visitor rates – but such robust traffic also pushes the blog’s technical aspects to its limits. Caching is used to ensure that visitors aren’t turned off by long loading times and limited performance. This involves saving generated pages once, so that calling the page again doesn’t require a new database query. The WordPress extension W3 Total Cache helps with this process. It generates static HTML pages, which help provide shorter loading times. This increases your website’s performance and helps keep visitors happy. Find more tips on how you can make your WordPress site faster in this article from the 1&1 IONOS Digital Guide.

The plugin AMP from Automattic adds the support of Accelerated Mobile Pages to a WordPress project. The open source initiative operates with the goal of optimizing content for mobile devices, characterized by a markedly faster loading time. By using the AMP extension, AMP compatible versions for all pages of your web project are automatically created, which are accessible by adding the suffix /amp/ to the end of the respective URL (e.g. “one.test.website/amp/”). The output of these optimized versions is regulated by the AMP recipient, however, such as Google.

Since WordPress doesn’t provide any in-house contact forms, you need a plugin that provides the most flexible and, above all, the most responsive forms for your site. Contact Form 7 is the most well-known and the most popular of its kind. The extension can be integrated quickly and easily, and provides all important functions. To visually adapt the contact form to your own design, basic CSS knowledge is an advantage. Some alternatives are the paid extension Gravity Forms or Caldera Forms. The latter is particularly appealing due to its practical and intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

While the name Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) may sound complex, the WordPress plugin actually offers a quite simple, but practical function for listing topically relevant entries under visited blog articles. This simple trick can help increase the length of a visitor’s stay by offering links to similar content. To aesthetically customize the frontend of your site, you need basic CSS knowledge.

With the help of the WordPress shop plugin WooCommerce, you can implement a complete online shop. Beginners, in particular, benefit from a manageable range that gives the opportunity to administer all important e-commerce processes – such as the product offer, shipping, or purchase processing – via the familiar WordPress interface. Navigation and design of your web shop can be individually designed – the WooCommerce installation wizard only generates a main navigation menu with the tabs ‘Shop’, ‘Shopping Cart’, ‘Checkout’, and ‘My Account’. To meet the needs of larger, professional online shops, the developer offers Automattic (paid) premium features for the WordPress shop plugin. Read more about setting up a shop with WooCommerce in this article from the 1&1 IONOS Digital Guide.

Following our recommendation of the ten best free WordPress plugins are these, the top 10 paid extensions. These are often referred to as premium plugins, since they offer a large range of functions as sales products, and are often linked to a special support offer from the manufacturer.

If you want to offer your web project in multiple countries, you generally need various language versions to make it possible to offer all visitors the optimal user experience. The WordPress premium plugin WPML from OnTheGoSystems offers that function: With translation help for entries, pages, taxonomy, and menus as well as automatic browser language recognition, the basic package offers all features for a multilingual blog. The cost-intensive package ‘Multlingual CMS’ gives users access to additional translation options to also translate widgets or texts from themes, plugins, and other WordPress extensions. To coordinate work on multilingual projects, this version of WPML also allows translation management with several users.

For WordPress users with a rather limited programming knowledge, Visual Composer from WPBakery is highly recommended: The page builder plugin extends the CMS with a powerful WYSIWIG editor, which helps adapt the front and backend as required. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a standard theme or a user-defined template. With the extension, you can easily integrate content elements such as text blocks, icons, social media buttons, photo galleries, or call-to-actions into the desired web project without having to write a single line of code. The WordPress premium plugin automatically takes care of it for you, and makes sure that all pages are responsive.

A good way to measure the satisfaction of website visitors is by using an evaluation function, either on the website or under the various entries. In e-commerce, evaluation also serve as sale recommendations for potential customers. In addition, ratings, which can be presented in the Google results, also add value for search engine users. With Taqyeem, the Egyptian company TieLabs developed one of the most successful and best WordPress plugins for the integration of a user rating system and the presentation of product reviews (i.e. test reports). Everything can be customized with more than 500 Google Web fonts, different typographic options, and three available rating styles (stars, points, and percentages).

Without returning visitors, long-term success for your web project is difficult to achieve. Well-functioning lead management plays a very important role in the management of a website. Operators of online shops and blogs, in particular, are constantly fighting to obtain regular customers or readers, and so are dependent on good tools. One of the best solutions is the WordPress premium plugin OptinMonster. The integrated drag-and-drop editor allow you to create attractive forms within just a few minutes, for example, to get users to enter their e-mail address for a contact list. With simple A/B testing and detailed statistic, you can also measure and analyze the success of different variations.

Akismet from Automattic is the premium solution for website spam. The filtering service has existed since 2005 and is available by default in the basic version to all users who host their project on WordPress. To be able to use the features of the premium WordPress plugin for commercial sites as well, you have to sign up for a monthly subscription. The two paid packages ‘Plus’ and ‘Enterprise’ offer expansive statistics and prioritized support from the manufacturer. The extension is regularly updated to be able to react to current spam trends in a timely manner.

To earn money with your web project, advertising and affiliate programs are often the first choice. An exciting alternative which is gaining in popularity, though, is offering premium content. This deals with content of various types that is only available to paying users. News magazines particularly use this model quite a lot. But managing your memberships well is incredibly important if you’re offering premium content.

The WordPress extension Restrict Content Pro supports WordPress users with the implementation of such paywall and membership organization functions. Using the tool, you can create an unrestricted number of membership packages and easily equip them with different access rights. Restrict Content Pro also has various payment services available over the interface, such as 2Checkout, Alipay, and PayPal.

WP Rocket is the first choice for many experts when it comes to improving the performance of WordPress. The premium plugin ensures that all pages of a project are loaded into the cache, allowing them to be delivered more quickly. It uses a special bot to simulate the visit of the website at regular intervals to do this. The loading time is reduced by automatically compressing all static files such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS documents. Thanks to the LazyLoad feature, the website visitor’s browser only loads embedded images once they reach the user’s viewport.

WordPress already offers the most important functions for creating new pages, linking them to one another, and getting pages started right away. But the content management system can only deploy its full strength by using plugins, which significantly expand its functionality. It doesn’t matter whether the extensions are for stores, security, search engine optimization, or social media connections; WordPress extensions allow you to expand the open source platform to perfectly tailor it to the needs of the website operator.

A WordPress plugin is an additional program that extends the code of the web application to build a new function. Strictly speaking, any extension or modification of the WordPress code is a plugin. An experienced user with programming knowledge also has the option to change the code on their own and write new functions into their theme’s functions.php file. When downloading WordPress extensions, you should always pay attention that the source is trustworthy and secure (like the WordPress repository or 1&1 IONOS App Center, for example).

Trying to speak of the ‘best WordPress plugins for 2017’ is obviously somewhat difficult, since interests and needs vary strongly from user to user and, in most cases, probably only one or the other of the presented plugins is relevant at all. For this reason, independently searching for suitable extensions is highly recommended. The previously mentioned WordPress repository, accessible directly from the content management system, is undoubtedly the most important source for WordPress plugins. Just as with the 1&1 IONOS App Center, each new extension is also checked for its functionality and trustworthiness so that the WordPress plugin download can be classified as very secure.

There are other sources for extensions, though – especially for WordPress premium plugins that are paid from the outset and not listed in the official directory:

• CodeCanyon: When it comes to functional, cost-driven extensions, one can hardly miss visiting CodeCanyon. The directory of the online platform includes over 5,800 WordPress plugins, and also distributes extensions to other content management systems like Joomla or Drupal. Filter searches can be restricted by price, category, sale price, or rating.
• MOJO Marketplace: Around 50 extensions are contained in the WordPress plugin directory from MOJO Marketplace. The web platform, which contains a live demo for each extension, also contains offers for more than 1,000 themes and templates for the content management system.
• accessPress: accessPress offers a mix of more than 50 free and paid WordPress plugins available for download or purchase. You can view detailed information on the extensions (description, publication date, price, license, time of the last update, etc.), as well as documentation and a live preview.
• GitHub: New WordPress extensions are regularly published on GitHub as well. Searching is relatively complicated, though, since you can only search the entire developer platform. But if you’re not too fed up with the 90,000+ available repositories with WordPress extensions, you’ll find a lot of useful plugins here.

There are no limits to the add-on extensions for WordPress. The quantity of plugins also doesn’t necessarily have any effect on the performance of a website. So, it’s quite possible that a project is just as fast as usual with a lot of extensions. More important than number is the quantity of WordPress plugins. For example, a single incorrectly-programmed extension may significantly impair performance or cause other problems.

To prevent these kinds of technical problems, plugins should always be deliberately chosen and regularly checked to make sure they’re still necessary. Otherwise, the overview of installed extensions can quickly get out of hand – a problem that can be avoided with managed WordPress hosting. With such hosting packages, only a set selection of high-value, functional plugins are available.

The fact that the installation of new plugins can be run directly in WordPress enormously simplifies the extension of the content management system. Regardless of whether the respective package is found via the integrated search and downloaded or integrated using the import function – the user just needs to follow the installation wizard’s instructions to add and activate the desired function. The practical list of all implemented WordPress extensions also helps to manage them. The CMS also automatically takes over the classification of installed plugins and places them into the folder wp-content/plugins. Language files and translations for extensions end up in the folder wp-content/languages.

There are many free WordPress plugins, and more and more are being released every day. But many plugins aren’t worth downloading, as they often lead to back end confusion. What’s more, there’s always a chance of unforeseen interaction occurring between the plugin and the CMS. The incompatibility of many programs and components can quickly lead to gaps in security. Plugins should only be installed if they are to be regularly used. Many administrative plugins can be uninstalled after having fulfilled their purpose. The plugin Security Scanner lets users check to see if installed plugins have led to any security gaps.