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Categories

A taxonomy built by reading every plugin

17 top-level categories and 157 sub-categories, none of them written by hand. A language model reads each plugin's own description and either places it in the taxonomy as it stands or proposes an addition to it.

Coverage

How far it has got

Every other figure on this site is a read of stored data and costs nothing to recompute. This one costs a model call per plugin, so it advances in batches rather than all at once.

17 Top-level categories Every one of them proposed by the model, not chosen up front
157 Sub-categories The second level, held inside its parent
11,364 Plugins classified 14.59% of the live directory so far. The taxonomy is real; the coverage is a work in progress.
668.5 Plugins per category Mean, across the categories built so far
Read the coverage figure first

11,364 of 77,898 live plugins have been through the classifier. So the shape of the taxonomy below is meaningful - these are the categories a model reaches for when it reads real plugins - but the plugin counts inside it are counts of the sample, not of the directory. Do not read "Security has the most plugins" off this page.

Read from 131,125 plugin records - figures refreshed 5 hours ago

Why bother

The directory has no categories

It has tags: a handful of free-text labels per plugin, typed by the author, with no hierarchy and no definitions. There are 65,232 distinct ones in use. Nothing stops "post", "posts" and "gutenberg" from all describing the same plugin, and nothing connects "ecommerce" to "woocommerce".

That is fine for a search box and useless for a count. You cannot ask a tag cloud how many form plugins exist, or what share of the directory is about security, because the labels overlap, compete and repeat.

A two-level taxonomy answers those questions. Building one by hand over a hundred thousand plugins is not realistic - so the model builds it as it goes, and the method page explains what had to change before that was trustworthy.

How classification works

What the classifier is given

  • The plugin's name, slug and author-written description
  • Its own tags, as a hint and not as an answer
  • The entire taxonomy built so far, categories and sub-categories
  • Permission to propose a new category when nothing fits
  • One chance to answer - the whole placement is a single call

Distribution

Where the classified plugins landed

Counts within the classified sample, largest first. Treat this as a picture of which categories the model reaches for, not of the directory's composition.

  • Content Management 2,497 22.0%
  • Design & Customization 2,307 20.3%
  • Ecommerce 1,742 15.3%
  • Communication 787 6.9%
  • Security 723 6.4%
  • Site Management 623 5.5%
  • SEO 459 4.0%
  • Marketing 438 3.9%
  • Performance 386 3.4%
  • AI & Automation 275 2.4%
  • Analytics & Insights 272 2.4%
  • Monetization 249 2.2%
  • Search & Navigation 232 2.0%
  • Privacy & Compliance 160 1.4%
  • Multilingual & Translation 99 0.9%
  • Accessibility 68 0.6%
  • Business Management 47 0.4%

Two levels

The whole taxonomy

Every category, with the sub-categories built inside it and the number of classified plugins in each.

Content Management

2,497 plugins

Plugins for creating, editing, organizing, and publishing WordPress content.

Design & Customization

2,307 plugins

Plugins that provide themes, starter templates, layout controls, visual styling options, and other tools for designing and customizing WordPress sites.

Ecommerce

1,742 plugins

Plugins that add or enhance online-store functionality, including product sales, carts, checkout, payments, and purchase flows.

Communication

787 plugins

Plugins that enable website visitors and site owners to communicate through chat, messaging, contact channels, and engagement tools.

Security

723 plugins

Plugins that protect WordPress sites, users, and submitted data from threats, abuse, and unwanted activity.

Site Management

623 plugins

Plugins for maintaining, administering, backing up, restoring, and moving WordPress sites.

SEO

459 plugins

Plugins that optimize WordPress sites and content for search-engine visibility, rankings, structured data, and search analytics.

Marketing

438 plugins

Plugins that promote a site and its content: social media presence, email marketing and newsletters, campaigns, and audience growth.

Performance

386 plugins

Plugins that improve WordPress site speed, loading efficiency, caching, and front-end asset delivery.

AI & Automation

275 plugins

Plugins that use artificial intelligence or automated agents to generate, modify, manage, or optimize WordPress content, design, code, and site workflows.

Analytics & Insights

272 plugins

Plugins that collect, report, and visualize website traffic, visitor behavior, conversions, and other site performance metrics.

Monetization

249 plugins

Plugins that help WordPress sites generate, manage, and optimize revenue through advertising, subscriptions, affiliate tools, and related monetization features.

Search & Navigation

232 plugins

Plugins that improve how visitors find and navigate website content through on-site search, menus, filters, and related discovery tools.

Privacy & Compliance

160 plugins

Plugins that help WordPress sites meet privacy, data-protection, consent, and regulatory compliance requirements.

Multilingual & Translation

99 plugins

Plugins that make WordPress sites available in multiple languages through content translation, language selection, localization, and multilingual publishing tools.

Accessibility

68 plugins

Plugins that help make WordPress sites more accessible to people with disabilities through audits, remediation guidance, accessible design controls, and compliance support.

Business Management

47 plugins

Plugins that help site owners run business workflows in WordPress, including managing customers, leads, sales activity, and client-facing business records.

Placements

Judge it for yourself

The most-installed classified plugins in each of the six largest categories. This is the check that matters: a taxonomy is only as good as the placements it produced.

Content Management

Design & Customization

Ecommerce

Communication

Security

Site Management

The interesting question is how often it is wrong

Re-running the same plugin through the same model used to change its category two times in three. The method page has what fixed that, and what it measures now.

Read the method Open the statistics