9 Top WordPress Plugins to Install This Year

WordPress may not be all that glamorous when it first comes out of the box. Yet, its affinity for easy customization using plugins has made it the most popular and widely-used CMS platform on the market today.

Whenever you need to incorporate a useful capability or function into your site, there is almost always a plugin that will do the task.

In most cases, there are tens or even hundreds that could do the job. The number of available plugins is not limitless, but there are still tens of thousands to choose among. Which can make finding the best one, or even a better than average one, a challenge.

The good news is this: We’ve chosen some of the best WordPress plugins on the market for your consideration.

These 9 plugins are all quite useful. One or two of them could be considered mandatory if you don’t already have the functionality they offer.

wpDataTables

The wpDataTables plugin gives you host of useful data management functionalities. wpDataTables enables you to create tables and charts, but it’s capabilities go well beyond that. The tables and charts are interactive, natively responsive, and editable. Editing a table in wpDataTables, is no more difficult than editing a table in Excel. In addition, these tables can be extremely large. At the same time, editing or managing the tables can be done quickly, since the data management functions are controlled by the MySQL server.

The tables you create can in turn be used to create charts; which, like the tables themselves, can be edited in real time; plus, selected cells, columns, or rows can be highlighted. The wpDataTables plugin is also convenient for maintaining existing tables and charts; when it’s important that the tables and charts you create need to be kept up to date.

Content Timeline

Good web design depends greatly on the ability to manage content such that it is presented in the most appropriate manner. Content Timeline is a highly useful plugin that enables you to display content in a sliding timeline.

A sliding content timeline is easy to create. It’s primarily a matter of using drag and drop functionality. The resulting timeline will be both responsive and completely customizable. You can add, delete, and sort blocks of content as you so choose. You can also edit an item in a timeline, in its own window. You can also give a timeline a cool or professional look with the 12 customizable Card Layouts, and you can also create your own.

This plugin enables you to incorporate several highly useful features into your timelines; Swipe functionality for one.  And posts, for example, can be sorted by category, year, or month, for another.

LayerSlider

LayerSlider is a popular plugin. Its functionalities and capabilities can be observed in large numbers of websites built around creative and innovative design practices.

Where this WP plugin really shines is the overall flexibility it provides, and, thanks to the complexity of animations its multi-purpose animation platform can create, the ability to incorporate some truly mind-boggling slideshows, galleries, and landing pages. Or, build a dynamic content slider that automatically adds posts as they appear.

If you can think of it, LayerSlider can animate it. Functionality ranges from random or cyclical actions and multi-step animations, to split text animations, flying letters, stackable transitions, pop-out effects, and on and on.

Purchasing LayerSlider as a standalone tool makes sense since you stand to gain from all the features and benefits this plugin brings to the table, and at lesser expense than its main competitor.

Logic Hop

2017 will be “year of the marketer” thanks to technologies like marketing automation and personalization. WordPress is often left out from cutting edge solutions – Enter Logic Hop, personalization engineered for WordPress.

Logic Hop uses real-time data to target individual users by showing customized content and calls-to-action. A fully integrated solution, it’s easy to click-to-add personalization and dramatically increase conversions. Best of all, you can try Logic Hop risk-free for 14 days.

Wordfence Security

Wordfence Security, the most downloaded WordPress security plugin, is an open-source plugin (which means it’s 100% free!) that features a protective Web Application Firewall to protect your website from hackers.

Its Scan and Live Traffic features will check or the presence of malware, and alert you in real time should your site be compromised or subjected to a hacking attempt.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is a “must-have” plugin, because of the punch it can deliver. This WP plugin can increase your website’s performance and reduce its download times, and do both seriously. As a result, your site should experience marked increases in SEO, the UX, search engine ranking, and conversion rate. It will definitely be worth your time to visit the website to find out everything this plugin could do for you.

Yellow Pencil

Yellow Pencil is a plugin that enables you to edit your website in real time. It’s a CSS style editor that you can use to click on an element an edit it visually, whether you are working directly from WordPress or working with a WordPress theme.

The net result is that thanks to Yellow Pencil’s 50+ style properties, you can have much more control over your website design activities than you thought possible.

WooThumbs – Awesome Product Imagery

The WooThumbs Awesome Product Imagery plugin for WooCommerce gives you added flexibility to modify and enhance your product pages, or your one-page product website. It enables you to easily add multiple images to product variations, create an image carousel with horizontal or vertical slide, and so much more.

The zoom feature comes with multiple zoom effects that allow the user to get up close and personal with a product they are thinking of purchasing.

Final Tiles Gallery

Final Tiles Gallery makes creating a gallery quick and easy. It’s popular with professional photographers, and is in fact, one of the most highly used plugins by that niche.

You have complete freedom to build the layout you need or want. Final Tiles Gallery is built around a unique grid layout, which makes it possible to create gallery whose images are not constrained to having the same size or aspect ratio.

Summing up

These 9 plugins obviously have a great deal to offer. To add icing on the cake, some of them are available to try out for free. These plugins offer “must have” functionality like website security checks or performance enhancers.

Some give you cool design capabilities you either never knew existed or were unable to find up to now. The bottom line: you’ll very likely find one or more plugins you can put to good use.