A few days ago I started brainstorming some ideas for my first WordPress plugin. After going back and forth with some options, I decided to see if there is some public plugin data that I could use in my research. And what better source than the official WordPress.org plugin repository?

My first roadblock was a weird WordPress.org website issue in the Plugins section: there is no easy way to access a list of the Latest/Newest plugins that were added to the repository. You can do it for Themes, but not for Plugins.

On the main Plugins page, you can see a list of Block-Enabled Plugins, Featured Plugins, Beta Plugins and Popular Plugins, but no Latest Plugins block. No worries though, a minor issue like this won’t stop us.

All these pages have the URL in the form of https://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/[blocks|featured|beta|popular]/. All we have to do is manually type in the URL https://wordpress.org/plugins/browse/new/, so now we can see the most recent plugins and how well they are doing.

Using Public WordPress.org Plugin Data

I decided to go through some existing WordPress.org plugins and see if I could spot some common characteristics of popular plugins. Some plugin stats are publicly available, so maybe there is something useful there.

For example let’s take a look at the Social Icons Widget by WPZOOM plugin.

The data that we could use for our brainstorming session is:

Last updated;

Active installations;

Ratings – total number of reviews and the average rating score (1 to 5 stars);

Support – total number of support threads in the forum.

With this in mind, I created a small PHP script that would gather and parse this public data. With my script ready, I decided to analyze all plugins that were added to the directory in the past 36 months (2016/04/15 – 2019/04/15).

Maybe the results of my findings can be useful to other developers, so let’s get on with it.

WordPress.org Plugin Stats

I have decided to exclude from my stats the plugins that were published in the last 14 days, as most of them have no objective data.

I will be looking at: plugin active installations, total number of downloads, number of ratings, number of support threads (in the last 2 months). At the end of the article I have a list of 100 most used words in plugin names, so those keywords could be worth looking into.

Quick Stats

Date range: [2019-04-16 – 2016-04-15].

Total number of published plugins: 18,262.

Total number of published plugins included in stats: 18,087.

~18.3% of plugins have never been updated .

. Only 30 plugins out of 18,087 (0.16%) have surpassed 100,000+ active installations.

~68% of plugins released in the last 3 years have less than 100 of active installations .

released in the last 3 years have . ~57% of plugins have never been rated (no reviews).

(no reviews). ~76% of plugins have a homepage link.

~47% of plugins have a donate link.

Top 50 Plugins with the highest number of active installations

Currently there are only 30 plugins that have reached 100,000+ of active installations.

Top 20 Plugins with the highest number of downloads

Currently there are only 20 plugins that have surpassed the 1M+ downloads count.

Top 50 Plugins with the highest number of ratings

These are the top 50 most reviewed WordPress.org plugins that have been published in the last 3 years.

Top 50 Plugins with the highest number of support threads

These are the top 50 WordPress.org plugins ranked by the number of support threads created in the last 2 months. Ten of these plugins are related to WooCommerce.

Top 50 Authors with the highest number of published plugins

Plugin Active Installations

~68% of plugins released in the last 3 years have less than 100 of active installations.

Only 373 plugins out of 18,087 (2.06%) have surpassed 10,000+ active installations.

Only 30 plugins (0.16%) have surpassed 100,000+ active installations.

0 active installations – 5,646 plugins (31.22%)

10 active installations – 2,871 plugins (15.87%)

20 active installations – 1,020 plugins (5.64%)

30 active installations – 726 plugins (4.01%)

40 active installations – 558 plugins (3.09%)

50 active installations – 450 plugins (2.49%)

60 active installations – 338 plugins (1.87%)

70 active installations – 278 plugins (1.54%)

80 active installations – 272 plugins (1.50%)

90 active installations – 213 plugins (1.18%)

100 active installations – 1,415 plugins (7.82%)

200 active installations – 704 plugins (3.89%)

300 active installations – 432 plugins (2.39%)

400 active installations – 325 plugins (1.80%)

500 active installations – 219 plugins (1.21%)

600 active installations – 215 plugins (1.19%)

700 active installations – 171 plugins (0.95%)

800 active installations – 157 plugins (0.87%)

900 active installations – 137 plugins (0.76%)

1,000 active installations – 709 plugins (3.92%)

2,000 active installations – 315 plugins (1.74%)

3,000 active installations – 154 plugins (0.85%)

4,000 active installations – 122 plugins (0.67%)

5,000 active installations – 100 plugins (0.55%)

6,000 active installations – 57 plugins (0.32%)

7,000 active installations – 40 plugins (0.22%)

8,000 active installations – 41 plugins (0.23%)

9,000 active installations – 29 plugins (0.16%)

10,000 active installations – 192 plugins (1.06%)

20,000 active installations – 59 plugins (0.33%)

30,000 active installations – 32 plugins (0.18%)

40,000 active installations – 18 plugins (0.10%)

50,000 active installations – 16 plugins (0.09%)

60,000 active installations – 13 plugins (0.07%)

70,000 active installations – 6 plugins (0.03%)

80,000 active installations – 3 plugins (0.02%)

90,000 active installations – 4 plugins (0.02%)

100,000 active installations – 16 plugins (0.09%)

200,000 active installations – 3 plugins (0.02%)

300,000 active installations – 2 plugins (0.01%)

400,000 active installations – 1 plugin (0.01%)

500,000 active installations – 3 plugins (0.02%)

600,000 active installations – 1 plugin (0.01%)

800,000 active installations – 2 plugins (0.01%)

2,000,000 active installations – 1 plugin (0.01%)

4,000,000 active installations – 1 plugin (0.01%)

Plugin Total Download Count

1+ downloads – 11 plugins (0.06%)

10+ downloads – 1,551 plugins (8.58%)

100+ downloads – 10,701 plugins (59.16%)

1,000+ downloads – 4,438 plugins (24.54%)

10,000+ downloads – 1,186 plugins (6.56%)

100,000+ downloads – 180 plugins (0.99%)

1,000,000+ downloads – 19 plugins (0.10%)

10,000,000+ downloads – 1 plugin (0.005%)

Average Plugin Rating Score

No rating – 10,334 plugins (57.13%)

5.0 stars (perfect score) – 5,108 plugins (28.24%)

4.5 stars – 1,189 plugins (6.57%)

4.0 stars – 755 plugins (4.17%)

3.0 – 3.5 stars – 422 plugins (2.33%)

2.0 – 2.5 stars – 72 plugins (0.4%)

1.0 – 1.5 stars – 207 plugins (1.14%)

Amount of Plugin Ratings

No ratings – 10,334 plugins (57.13%)

1 rating – 3,133 plugins (17.32%)

2 ratings – 1,459 plugins (8.07%)

3 ratings – 771 plugins (4.26%)

4 ratings – 512 plugins (2.83%)

5 ratings – 316 plugins (1.75%)

6 ratings – 241 plugins (1.33%)

7 ratings – 177 plugins (0.98%)

8 ratings – 133 plugins (0.74%)

9 ratings – 112 plugins (0.62%)

10 ratings – 86 plugins (0.48%)

11-15 ratings – 270 plugins (1.49%)

16-20 ratings – 128 plugins (0.70%)

21-30 ratings – 152 plugins (0.84%)

31-40 ratings – 63 plugins (0.34%)

Top 100 Most used Words in Plugin Names

woocommerce – 1,945 widget – 480 post – 470 custom – 420 form – 410 simple – 390 page – 381 easy – 336 product – 325 image – 322 contact – 316 gateway – 288 payment – 281 google – 273 builder – 265 slider – 262 social – 259 manager – 245 gallery – 240 forms – 233 admin – 229 woo – 222 posts – 222 login – 216 content – 211 integration – 200 lite – 198 user – 188 search – 182 menu – 179 advanced – 162 media – 154 responsive – 152 block – 151 elementor – 150 seo – 148 shortcode – 146 blocks – 143 button – 142 free – 140 analytics – 140 email – 138 facebook – 138 popup – 137 order – 136 chat – 135 gutenberg – 134 video – 134 add – 126 live – 126 feed – 125 disable – 121 share – 118 api – 112 gravity – 111 ultimate – 109 editor – 109 bar – 105 category – 104 theme – 104 auto – 102 pro – 100 link – 99 checkout – 99 products – 99 cart – 98 shipping – 98 list – 96 remove – 96 digital – 94 web – 93 generator – 93 pages – 91 images – 89 widgets – 88 mobile – 88 wc – 87 from – 87 your – 87 shortcodes – 86 text – 86 booking – 85 comments – 85 dashboard – 85 hide – 85 map – 84 display – 84 featured – 84 fields – 83 links – 83 visual – 82 portfolio – 79 add-on – 79 code – 79 redirect – 78 embed – 78 css – 78 carousel – 77 youtube – 76 import – 76

I hope that this data will be useful to other people too. Feel free to share and distribute this data, but I would appreciate if you link back to this article as the source.

Are there any other metrics that you think it would be interesting to look at? Please comment below and I might update this article with the data.