Statistics
The plugin directory, in aggregate
131,237 plugin records, of which 78,010 are still served by wordpress.org. Every figure below is a query against those records, and every one of them carries the caveat it needs.
How big is it
Scale
A plugin enters this record when its slug appears in the directory index, and never leaves it. That is the difference between the first figure and the second.
Read from 131,237 plugin records - figures refreshed 2 hours ago
Status
Live, closed, gone
Every record carries the answer the API gave the last time its slug was asked. Three answers are possible, and the difference between the last two matters.
Closed is a deliberate act: the author withdrew the plugin, or the plugin team closed it - for a security issue, a guideline breach, or abandonment. The directory still knows the slug and says so.
Not found is thinner. The slug was in the index at some point and the API now has nothing at all for it. Treat the count as the record's own margin of error rather than as a fact about plugins.
Distribution
Active installs
Across the live directory. 67 plugins are on a million sites or more; 30,281 report none at all. The bands are the directory's own, because the underlying figure is rounded before it is published.
The directory never publishes an install count below ten, and rounds hard above it - so the two bottom bands are a floor, and every plugin above ten million shares one published number. Read the shape, not the edges.
Quality, as voted
Ratings
31,069 live plugins carry at least one rating and 46,941 carry none. Among the rated, the average is 4.49 out of five - a figure that says as much about who writes reviews as about the plugins.
This chart counts only the 6,304 plugins with ten ratings or more. Below that a single review moves a plugin two whole stars, and the distribution becomes a chart about sample size.
Taken across every live plugin instead, the average rating reads under two stars - not because the directory is bad, but because an unrated plugin is stored as a zero. That is the single easiest statistic to get wrong about the directory.
By year
When they arrived
The year each live plugin was added to the directory, back to 2004. Only surviving plugins are counted, so the early years read thinner than they were - this is a chart of what is left, not of what was published.
The top row is 2026, which is still running - it is a partial year against complete ones, and it will keep growing until it is not.
And every row counts only plugins that are still live. A plugin added in 2009 and withdrawn in 2012 sits in the closed set, not in the 2009 row, so the older a year is the more of it is missing here.
Maintenance
Is anybody still there?
The last release date is the most useful field the directory publishes and the one least often looked at. Installability is not maintenance.
Effort
Releases and contributors
Two fields that show how much work sits behind a plugin: how many versions it has shipped, and how many people are credited on it.
Tags
The tags authors actually type
The directory's only native classification is a handful of free-text tags per plugin, and there are 65,252 distinct ones in use. These are the twenty-four most common, counted across the live directory.
- woocommerce 10,389
- seo 2,878
- widget 2,674
- ai 2,457
- admin 1,821
- security 1,795
- shortcode 1,574
- post 1,386
- elementor 1,361
- gutenberg 1,342
- posts 1,271
- analytics 1,257
- ecommerce 1,252
- email 1,217
- comments 1,176
- performance 1,103
- chatbot 1,042
- block 1,030
- login 1,009
- images 994
- payment gateway 976
- image 906
- content 890
- checkout 826
65,252 labels, no hierarchy, no definitions, and nothing stopping "posts", "post" and "gutenberg" all describing the same plugin. It is a folksonomy - useful for search, useless for counting. The AI taxonomy is the answer to this chart.
Now look at the top of each list
Aggregates tell you the shape. The leaderboards tell you who is at the edges of it.