The WordPress plugin directory, measured
Every plugin in the directory, counted and categorised
WP Analyzer keeps its own copy of the public plugin directory - every slug, every published metric, refreshed and re-read - then puts an AI-built taxonomy over the top. The numbers on this site are queries, not claims.
What is here
Four ways to read the directory
The plugin directory gives you a search box and a list. It does not tell you how big it is, what it is made of, or where any one plugin sits against the rest. That is what these pages do.
Statistics
Scale, install distribution, ratings, arrival years and the tags people actually use - the directory described as a whole rather than one plugin at a time. Open the statistics.
Rankings
Seven leaderboards with their thresholds stated: most installed, most reviewed, highest rated, newcomers, most releases, biggest teams, best-answered support. See the rankings.
Categories
A two-level taxonomy the directory does not have, proposed and kept consistent by a language model reading each plugin's own description. Browse the taxonomy.
Method
How the mirror is built, how a plugin gets categorised in a single model call, and what the consistency checks measured. Read the method.
The shape of it
Almost nothing in the directory is widely used
Active installs across the 77,898 plugins the directory still serves. 67 of them are on a million sites or more. 30,169 report no installs at all.
The directory rounds the install figure hard and never publishes one below ten, so the bottom band is a floor rather than a measurement. It means "fewer than ten sites, or none" - and a quarter of the live directory sits there.
Beyond the front page
The long tail is most of the directory
Three figures that are hard to see from inside a search result, and change what a plugin count is worth.
Method
How the record is built
Three passes, each one independent of the others, each one re-runnable without disturbing what came before.
Pass one Mirror the index
The directory publishes a plain list of every plugin slug it has ever hosted. That list is read in full and stored, which is why withdrawn plugins stay in the record instead of vanishing from it.
Pass two Fetch each record
Every slug is then asked for its full API record - ratings, installs, versions, contributors, tags, support counts, the lot - and the response is stored whole, including the ones that answer "closed".
Pass three Categorise
A language model reads the plugin's own description alongside the taxonomy built so far, and places it in one call - picking an existing category or proposing a new one. What that costs, and how consistent it is.
Rankings
The ten most installed plugins
One of seven boards. Every one of them states the threshold it was built with, because a leaderboard without a threshold is a list of accidents.
| # | Plugin | Rating | Active installs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yoast SEO – Advanced SEO with real-time guidance and built-in AI wordpress-seo | 4.8 / 5 from 27.8K | 10M |
| 2 | Elementor Website Builder – more than just a page builder elementor | 4.5 / 5 from 7.3K | 10M |
| 3 | Contact Form 7 contact-form-7 | 4.0 / 5 from 2.2K | 10M |
| 4 | Classic Editor classic-editor | 4.9 / 5 from 1.3K | 8M |
| 5 | WooCommerce woocommerce | 4.5 / 5 from 4.8K | 7M |
| 6 | LiteSpeed Cache litespeed-cache | 4.8 / 5 from 2.8K | 7M |
| 7 | WPForms – AI Form Builder for WordPress – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Survey Form, Quiz & More wpforms-lite | 4.8 / 5 from 14.4K | 5M |
| 8 | All-in-One WP Migration and Backup all-in-one-wp-migration | 4.5 / 5 from 7.7K | 5M |
| 9 | Wordfence Security – Firewall, Malware Scan, and Login Security wordfence | 4.7 / 5 from 5.0K | 5M |
| 10 | Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection akismet | 4.7 / 5 from 1.2K | 5M |
Categories
A taxonomy the directory does not have
The directory sorts plugins by free-text tags an author types in themselves. This is the alternative: 17 categories and 157 sub-categories, every one of them proposed by a model reading the plugin rather than by a committee.
Content Management
2,497 pluginsPlugins for creating, editing, organizing, and publishing WordPress content.
Design & Customization
2,307 pluginsPlugins that provide themes, starter templates, layout controls, visual styling options, and other tools for designing and customizing WordPress sites.
Ecommerce
1,742 pluginsPlugins that add or enhance online-store functionality, including product sales, carts, checkout, payments, and purchase flows.
Communication
787 pluginsPlugins that enable website visitors and site owners to communicate through chat, messaging, contact channels, and engagement tools.
Before you ask
Questions
The public wordpress.org plugin index and plugin information API - the same endpoints your own WordPress install uses to show you plugin search results. Nothing here is scraped from a page, and nothing is private.
No. WP Analyzer is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the WordPress project, Automattic, or any plugin author listed on it.
Each page states when its figures were last read, at the foot of the section. The aggregates are rebuilt daily from the stored records; the stored records themselves are re-fetched in passes, so an individual plugin's row is as fresh as the last time its slug came up.
Yes, and the interesting question is how often. Re-running the same plugin through the same model used to change its top-level category two times in three; after the prompt was rebuilt to carry the whole taxonomy in one call, it agreed 40 times out of 40. The method page has the numbers and the caveats.
Start with the numbers
No account, no export gate, no email. Every figure on this site is a page you can open and a query you can read about.