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Best-Selling WordPress Plugins in 2018

Best-Selling WordPress Plugins in 2018

WordPress is an amazing platform as it is, but let’s be honest: it wouldn’t be half as amazing without all the incredible plugins.

WordPress plugins make our websites better. That’s the simple truth that any WordPress user, admin or developer will tell you. There are plugins for everything these days. If you’re lazy enough, you can have one for every single action you want to perform in your backend. (Don’t do that, though. Seriously, having too many plugins is detrimental for your website’s performance).

Considering how popular plugins are, and how many of them there are, it’s no wonder the plugin market is a particularly lively one. Let’s take a quick look back into 2018 and see which plugins were the most popular among WordPress users in the previous year.

1. Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin

Slider Revolution Responsive WordPress Plugin

One of the best-selling WordPress plugins of all times, the Slider Revolution plugin is so popular it’s almost become a norm to have it on your website. What this plugin does essentially is allow you to create stunning, impressive sliders of all kinds, with little or no effort. And with no coding knowledge is required whatsoever. Each of the slides you create with this plugin has incredible depth. You can add unlimited layers, and with different media types too. This means you can add images, videos, shortcodes, buttons, animating each of them separately, for a truly unique and impressive result.

Many of the best WordPress themes include this plugin for free to increase the value of the theme itself. This just goes to show that it is truly a valuable asset.

Finally, in addition to actual sliders, you can use Slider Revolution to create beautiful carousels, home page sliders and even one-page websites.

2. Contact Form 7

contact-form-plugins

Another immensely popular plugin, Contact Form 7 allows you to create functional, high-performance and versatile contact forms, which made it the cream of the crop among contact form plugins. This is an essential feature for any website owner who wants to generate quality leads. Actually, regardless of the purpose of the website, we believe that every site should have a proper contact form. And that’s precisely why Contact Form 7 is so useful.

The plugin itself is very simple and light, despite the fact it performs so well. With this plugin, you can create and manage multiple contact forms, use reCAPTCHA verification and filter out spam with little to no effort. Carefully developed, Contact Form 7 does all this and more without requiring you to invest any particular expertise. The forms you create using this plugin are not just visually impressive but also ready to use, which is something we believe any user would appreciate.

In addition to reCAPTCHA, Contact Form 7 is compatible with some other super-useful plugins, such as Akismet (more on that later) and Constant Contact, creating a powerful conglomerate of highly efficient functionalities.

3. WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress

WPBakery Page Builder for WordPress Plugin

Here’s a plugin that pretty much makes the WordPress world go round. Well, okay, that might be an exaggeration but it is definitely a powerhouse of a plugin that makes lives of millions of WordPress users infinitely easier.

The whole point of this plugin is to allow users to create their own page layouts without having to actually know how to do it (with code). It’s a very simple, very intuitive and user-friendly drag&drop builder. Literally anyone with the minimum of computer literacy can use. No wonder it’s so popular – it helps you do so much and doesn’t ask for much in return.

WPBakery has been growing and improving over time, and today it is nearly perfect. In addition to allowing you to build pages and entire websites, it also provides a live preview of everything you’re doing. It basically leaves no room for mistake, and even if you do make one, you can always go back and fix it. On top of all that, WPBakery comes with an impressive library of premade templates and predefined content elements, as well as over 200 addons.

4. bbPress Plugin

bbPress plugin

As one of the best forum and community plugins around, bbPress has been steadily growing in sales ever since it was first launched. What exactly is it that makes this such a popular WordPress plugin? Well, for one, it has been developed with a strong focus on ease of integration and, in particular, on ease of use. Forums and online communities are quite demanding in all their aspects, but bbPress somehow makes creating and managing one a fun and easy job.

When it comes to plugins, bbPress is probably the most WordPress-based one. This means it has been created “the WordPress way,” with focus on clean, elegant code, and particular attention to speed and security. In addition to all this, bbPress is also highly customizable, with ready-made templates you can use to “dress” your online community.

Furthermore, it supports an impressive number of extensions, or secondary plugins, if you will, that help you do whatever it is you want to do with your forum. You get to create multisite forums, too, or to divide your site into sections, all managed from the same powerful but intuitive admin.

All in all, bbPress is a complex but light, high-performance plugin that won’t burden your site and will help you create and cultivate a strong community, the easy way.

5. LayerSlider Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin

LayerSlider Responsive WordPress Slider Plugin

LayerSlider is the perfect solution for everyone looking to enrich their WordPress website with impressive animated content, sliders and slideshows. It is powerful but flexible, robust but light, and it’s quite easy to use. Animated sliders have been very much in vogue for the last couple of years, and it’s a trend that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The editor is fast and easy to use – it’s based on drag&drop, and you get to undo and redo anything you want.

With this plugin, you can animate basically anything you want. There are more than 200 predefined slide animations, plus a plethora of cool effects, from the hip parallax to 3D and Ken Burns. The latest version even comes with support for the LayerSlider PopUp plugin, which allows you to do everything you would with your sliders, but with popups.

LayerSlider is more than just a slider builder. With it, you can create stunning and effective landing pages, page blocks, not to mention impressive image and video galleries. In fact, you can use it to build entire websites. This, combined with the ease of use and impressive effects that are available, make LayerSlider such a terrific plugin.

6. EventOn – WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

EventOn WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

There almost isn’t a business website in the world that doesn’t need a good event calendar. There are tons of plugins created for this purpose, but none of them come nearly as close to perfection as EventOn, the best WordPress event calendar plugin.

With a gorgeous, minimalistic design and an excellent appearance editor, EventOn is a great addition to any site, both stylistically and functionally. It comes equipped with everything you could possibly need for easy and efficient event management. It has its own set of unique shortcodes, expendable details, multi-day events option, recurring events, different color tags for different event categories, excellent maps and directions, Font Awesome and social share icons. You get to set featured events, span event until end time, hide past events and much more.

EventOn allows for a lot of flexibility in choosing what you want your events to be displayed like. You can set event cards or display single event pages. The choice is yours and the options are truly numerous. On top of all this, EventOn is a plugin that is very easy to use and comes with excellent support. All this combined adds up to one of the most popular, best-selling WordPress plugins of any kind.

7. Akismet Anti-Spam

Akismet Anti Spam Plugin

Spam is the common nightmare of every WordPress website administrator. The days when we had to fight spammers manually – which was always a losing game – are behind us, thanks to amazing plugins available for this purpose. Akismet Anti-Spam WordPress plugin is probably the best plugin of this kind, and definitely the best selling.

How exactly does Akismet work? It’s quite simple, really. The plugin operates with a vast global spam database. It takes comments and contact form submissions on your website and checks them against this database, easily detecting and filtering out spam. This all happens automatically, but you always have the ability, as a moderator, to spam or unspam comments or commentators upon which you don’t agree with Akismet. Plus, there is a discard feature that automatically rejects the worst spam so that it doesn’t take up your valuable disk space.

To use Akismet, you’ll need a special API key. These keys are free for personal blogs and websites, and paid for businesses and enterprises (albeit at a very modest price).

8. Essential Grid Gallery WordPress Plugin

Essential Grid Gallery WordPress Plugin

Essential Grid truly is just that – essential. This plugin is so widely used, it’s hard to imagine creating a website with media without this powerful little guy. Having revolutionized the way we build galleries in WordPress, Essential Grid just keeps growing, adding new features and functionalities.

Exactly what does this plugin do? In short, it creates gorgeous galleries. It uses images, video and audio material from various sources you provide. It integrates easily with similar plugins, with all the biggest social media platforms – most importantly, with Instagram. Finally, it comes with a library of ready-to-use templates.

Essential Grid also has a terrific skin editor, allowing for customization of the appearance of your galleries. That’s not all you get to customize, though. You can also set the way you want to display your content (cobbles, masonry, etc), as well as transition speed, navigation, filtering and sorting.

On top of all that, Essential Grid comes with full support and amazing video tutorials for beginners.

9. Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO Plugin

Advertised as “SEO for Everyone,” Yoast SEO truly is just that. It’s an amazing tool that helps you solve all your SEO-related conundrums. Plus, it does so in a way that won’t give you a massive headache or take up your valuable time. This plugin has been created to help you optimize your content in a way that is nearly automatic, but certainly incredibly easy and quick. It checks your content and gives you clues as to what you should improve, and how.

As a website owner or admin, you are probably aware of the importance of Search Engine Optimization. You may also be aware of the fact that SEO is neither simple nor particularly fun. Yoast SEO takes care of all that. This tool does most of the job for you by measuring the SEO value of your content. However, it also teaches you how to become better at it, so that one day you no longer have to rely on a plugin.

Yoast optimizes your keywords, creates page previews for major social networks, performs a readability check, helps you with taxonomies and makes sure your site doesn’t have any Google-unfriendly duplicate content. And that’s not nearly the half of the things this incredible WordPress plugin does.

10. WooCommerce

WooCommerce Plugin

WooCommerce is a plugin that doesn’t need any special introduction. Anyone who’s ever dabbled with e-commerce knows very well what WooCommerce does and how powerful it is. This best-selling e-commerce plugin has been around for a while, and it’s probably going to stick around for years to come.

It’s hard to say exactly what it is that makes WooCommerce so good. Is its plethora of incredible features and functionalities? Or perhaps the fact it grants total control and incredible flexibility to store owners? From displaying and offering your goods and services to selling them, shipping them and managing everything that happens after a sale, WooCommerce is the store manager of your dreams. This plugin integrates perfectly with WordPress, without a glitch. It also supports a vast number of extensions that can help you further optimize your business.

WooCommerce now powers more than 30% of all online stores. This not only makes it the most popular e-commerce plugin, but also earns WooCommerce a spot on the list of all-time best-selling WordPress plugins of any kind.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several things that all the items featured on the list of best-selling WordPress plugins in 2018 have in common. All of these amazing plugins boast a long list of useful features and great functionalities. As such, they make lives of website administrators infinitely easier. Additionally, they are all intuitive and user-friendly. Each of them was designed with one thing in mind, and that is to help you run a successful, high-ranking, fast and powerful website. Regardless of your niche or area of industry, we are certain your website could benefit from almost every one of the plugins we listed in this article.

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