Here's our pick of WP plugins, recommended for use in 2018
Caldera Form is a free and powerful plugin that creates responsive forms with a simple drag and drop editor that makes it easy to create forms for WordPress. The plug-in includes conditional logic, anti-spam, notification emails, and database entry tracking
Revolution Slider – the name of this plugin speaks for itself. The main difference from other sliders is the ability to customize each slide separately with unique animation, layers, and other features. In addition, the slider is fully responsive out of the box and works well on all devices tested.
WPBakery Page Builder (formerly Visual Composer) - the most popular drag and drop page builder for WordPress. It allows you to easily add and position different design elements, such as text and image boxes, sliders, and preconfigured widgets. You can build any layout with intuitive drag and drop builder without programming knowledge. The plugin includes options for designing columns and rows, various tools such as graphics, tabs, accordions, icons, buttons and much more.
One of the main criteria for evaluating website besides appearance is the loading speed. Lazy loading makes your site appear faster and saves bandwidth. BJ Lazy Load plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails and content iframes with a placeholder and loads the content as site visitor scrolls toward the bottom of the page.
Google Analytics is a quick way to add GA code and view site analytics withing WP CMS. Available views include You site’s performance at a glance, real time usage and much more.
iThemes Security – helps to secure WordPress website site from possible attacks and hacking using a number of protection methods. One of its main features is changing URL of the page for WordPress admin panel. Also, plugin allows configuring a complete admin lock at a specified time, blocks users after numerous unsuccessful login attempts to CMS, as well as third-party programs (brute force) that are used to find passwords, and much more.
The Advanced Access Manager is a universal plugin for comprehensive management of front-end and back-end permissions for all website users. You can do simple things like block user access to dashboard or assign specific user groups to unique content. The plugin also allows configuring categories of users in the WordPpress site, as well as adding new ones with unique rights.
Redirection is the most popular redirect manager for WordPress. With it you can easily manage 301 redirects, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This can help reduce errors and improve your site's ranking.
BackWPup can perform backup, optimization and restoring database from previously created backups. Provides synchronization and copying to both FTP and following cloud storage providers: Dropbox, S3, Amazon Glacier, Google Drive, Microsoft Azure, RackSpaceCloud, SugarSync. Convenient and easy to use.
Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins for SEO optimization that will help web site administrators in publishing high-quality and optimized content for search engines. Plugin clearly shows how the content will interact with search engines and evaluates readability of website's text.