Of the 73,049 plugins the WordPress directory still serves, 35,652 have not published a release in over two years. That is 49% — and every one of them is still one click away in your admin.
The numbers
- 26,169 shipped a release in the last six months — 36%
- 31,493 shipped one in the last year — 43%
- 35,652 have been silent for two years or more — 49%
The gap between those first two lines is worth sitting with: only about one plugin in fourteen shipped code in the six months after its previous release but inside the year. Plugins do not gently slow down. They are either being worked on or they have stopped.
Installability is not maintenance
Nothing about being in the directory implies anyone is still there. A plugin is removed when it is reported and closed, not when its author loses interest — so abandonment is invisible until you go looking for it. The directory does publish the last-updated date on every plugin page. It is the most useful field it has and the one people scroll past.
This matters more than the usual “is it compatible” worry. An unmaintained plugin does not stop working on the day WordPress updates; it stops getting security fixes years before you notice anything at all.
What to check instead of the install count
Three fields, all of them on the plugin’s own page, all of them on ours:
- Last release date. Inside a year is fine. Past two years, assume nobody is home.
- Number of ratings, not the rating. 42,257 live plugins have never been rated at all. A 5.0 from one review is not a 5.0.
- Support threads resolved. The directory reports a recent window. Threads open and unanswered is the clearest signal there is.
The plugins that do well on all three tend to be the ones you have heard of — TablePress and Wordfence both carry thousands of ratings and ship constantly — but the test is cheap enough to run on anything, and it is the one that separates a plugin kept alive deliberately from one simply left up.
A note on what this is not
None of this says the long tail should be deleted. A plugin that does one small thing correctly and has needed no changes since 2019 is not abandoned in any sense that matters — the field records silence, and silence has more than one cause. What the 49% figure argues for is looking, not panicking.
The maintenance breakdown sits on the statistics page, and the limits section of the method page is honest about what a last-updated date can and cannot tell you. Figures read September 2026.