About 43,000 live plugins have never been rated. That is more than half the directory. About 8,800 have been rated exactly once, and that one rating is five stars. Almost all of those sit on plugins with under 1,000 installs.
The stars start to mean something only after more people have written. About 6,300 plugins have ten ratings or more. Among them, the average is about 4.5 out of five, and it barely moves as plugins get larger. A plugin on a million sites and a plugin on a thousand sites score the same.
One review is a coin flip that landed on five
A single five-star review is the most common “rated” plugin in the directory. About 8,600 of those 8,800 plugins have fewer than 1,000 active installs. At that size, one visitor who liked the plugin is the entire public record.
The ratings section already refuses to chart this. It draws the star bands only for plugins with ten ratings or more, because below that a single review moves a plugin by whole stars. The highest-rated board goes further and requires 500 ratings. Without a floor the board is a list of plugins with one friendly click.
What this means: a five-star badge with a count of one is a sample size, displayed as a verdict.
Ten ratings still do not separate anyone
Raise the floor to ten ratings and the distribution collapses into the top of the scale. Of those 6,300 plugins, about 4,100 average 4.5 or higher and about 1,300 sit between 4 and 4.5. About 170 average under 3 stars. Only 13 plugins with 100 ratings or more average under 3.
Split the same plugins by how widely they are installed and the average does not budge.
| Active installs | Plugins with 10 or more ratings | Average stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 million or more | 67 | 4.53 |
| 100,000 to 1 million | 383 | 4.48 |
| 10,000 to 100,000 | About 1,500 | 4.50 |
| 1,000 to 10,000 | About 2,700 | 4.49 |
| Under 1,000 | About 1,800 | 4.39 |
The plugins people actually use are not rated higher than the small ones that managed to collect ten reviews. They are rated the same, because almost everything that collects reviews lands between 4 and 5.
What this means: the star average is a filter for “has a crowd of people been angry enough to write it down?” Once the count is real, the answer is almost always no. The number stops ranking plugins and starts confirming that they were not hated in public.
An unrated plugin is not a bad one
Taken across every live plugin, the average rating falls under two stars. That figure is in the statistics page for a reason: an unrated plugin is stored as zero. About 43,000 zeros will swamp any average. It is a statistic about missing reviews, and it is the easiest wrong reading of this data.
The same trap runs the other way. A small plugin with one five-star review is not a better plugin than a large one with a 4.6 from several hundred people. The large one has been complained at, and survived it. The small one has been visited by one generous person.
What to read instead of the stars
- Ignore the average until there are at least ten ratings. Under that, you are reading one or two people.
- Treat 4.5 and 4.8 as the same number. That is where almost every reviewed plugin lives, at every size.
- Use a floor when you rank. The highest-rated board on this site requires 500 ratings for this reason.
- Pair the stars with a maintenance date. A plugin can sit at 4.7 and still have gone quiet. The maintenance section is the other half of the decision.
The main conclusion
Most plugins have no rating. The most common rating that does exist is a single five stars, left on a plugin almost nobody runs. Among plugins with enough reviews to count, the average is about 4.5 everywhere you look, from a thousand installs to a million. The stars tell you that people are reluctant to mark a plugin down. They do not tell you which plugin to install.
Data note: Figures come from this site’s copy of the public plugin directory, read on 4 October 2026, and are rounded. The ratings section is the same record. Its headline totals refresh on a slower clock, so the unrated count there can differ by a few hundred.