Every year, Torque Magazine hosts Plugin Madness, an online voting competition in which WordPress plugins vie to become that year’s top plugin. Plugin Madness 2018 is in full swing and elected plugins are going head to head. Voting will continue for the next couple weeks and the winners will be announced April 16th.
To help inspire you, we’ve compiled a list of the top four plugins from Plugin Madness 2017. Who will win this year? Get voting!
Semi-Finalists
These plugins made it through four initial rounds and made it to the semi-finals. Coincidentally, they were both developed by the digital agency Modern Tribe.
The Events Calendar
If I had to describe The Events Calendar plugin in two words, they would be ‘user-friendly.’ This plugin was built with stability and security in mind and has been rigorously tested to ensure compatibility and ease-of-use. Out-of-the-box you will be able to create events in less than 5 minutes. Noteworthy features include saved venues, Google maps integration, and Google Calendar exportation.
Event Tickets
Event Tickets provides a simple way for users to purchase, RSVP and manage tickets to events. Similiar to The Events Calendar, Events Tickets is very user-friendly. The plugin does not include a shortcode for this very reason; simply turn it on, fine-tune the settings and it’s ready to go. This plugin operates hand and hand with users’ PayPal accounts for seamless payments and collections.
Finalists
These two plugins made it to the final round. Ultimately, the image optimization plugin Smush went home with the gold.
WordFence
WordFence was built to protect WordPress; this plugin includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner. The firewall identifies and blocks malicious traffic, blocks blacklisted IPs, protects your site at the endpoint, enabling deep integration with WordPress and more. Simultaneously, the malware scanner checks core files, themes and plugins for malware, bad URLs, backdoors, SEO spam, malicious redirects and code injections. It’s security heaven!
Champion: Smush
Created by WPMU DEV, Smush allows you resize, optimize, and compress all of your images on WordPress. The Smush servers strip heavy, unneeded information from your photo to reduce the file size without jeopardizing its quality. In an age when speed is everything, Smush will help speed up your site by quickly smushing every single one of your images.
Don’t forget to vote for your favorite plugin of 2018!
Alyssa is a Content Specialist at WP Engine. If she’s not searching for a swimming hole to escape the heat in, you can usually find her baking something caloric or reading.
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