The following year, Abdumalik earned her final two GM norms in succession at the Karpos Open in March and the Budapest Spring Festival in April. She scored 7/9 at the former event to finish in fifth place. At the latter event, she was in contention for first place after starting with a score of 6/7 and defeating Tamás Bánusz, a GM rated 2617, but lost her last two games. With all three norms, she only needed to reach a rating of 2500 to earn the GM title. She came close to reaching 2500 at her next tournament, the Open Internacional Llucmajor in Spain. Having started the event with a rating of 2484, she peaked at an unpublished rating of 2496.5 in the middle of the event before losing her next two games, the first to G.A. Stany. Later in 2018, Abdumalik entered her first Women's World Chess Championship, which was played as a 64-player knockout tournament at the time. As the 15th seed, she made it to the quarterfinals. All four of her matches went to tiebreaks. Abdumalik won the first three matches against 50th seed Padmini Rout, 18th seed Zhao Xue, and 31st seed Jolanta Zawadzka in the first set of tiebreaks, played in a 25+10 rapid format. She then was eliminated by 7th seed Mariya Muzychuk. Both players each won once in the two-game classical match, the 25+10 rapid pair, and the 10+10 rapid pair before Muzychuk advanced by winning their first blitz game and drawing the other.