More than 16,000 plugins were added to the WordPress directory in the last twelve months. About three out of four came from a publisher with three or fewer plugins to their name.
Fewer than 100 of those plugins reached 1,000 active installs. Around 40 of the ones that did came from those same small publishers.
At first glance that looks fair. Small publishers made most of the launches and took a good share of the wins. But the share of launches and the share of wins are not the same thing, and once you compare them the picture changes.
An established publisher was about four times more likely to succeed
Small publishers made roughly three quarters of the launches but won under half the breakouts. Publishers with four or more plugins did the opposite.
| Publisher | New plugins | Reached 1,000 installs | Chance of reaching 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Three or fewer plugins | About 12,000 | Around 40 | About 1 in 300 |
| Four or more plugins | About 4,000 | Around 55 | About 1 in 70 |
So a first or second plugin had roughly a quarter of the chance of a plugin from a publisher who already had a shelf of them.
What this means: the directory treats every plugin the same way, but users do not. A publisher who already has plugins has somewhere to announce the next one.
It is not because one group launched later
A new plugin needs time to gather installs, so a gap like this could simply mean one group launched more recently. That is not what happened here. Both groups averaged about four months old. And when the plugins are split by age, the gap stays — and grows for the older ones.
| Plugin age | Three or fewer plugins | Four or more plugins |
|---|---|---|
| Six to twelve months old | About 0.8% reached 1,000 | About 3% reached 1,000 |
| Under six months old | About 0.1% reached 1,000 | About 0.8% reached 1,000 |
What this means: more time does help a plugin grow, but it does not close the gap. Waiting is not the missing ingredient.
The installs are far more concentrated than the wins
Counting breakouts makes the two groups look close. Counting actual users does not. Plugins from established publishers hold roughly nine tenths of all the installs won in the last year.
They also climbed higher. More than a third of their breakouts went on to pass 10,000 installs. Among small publishers, only about one in eight did.
There is a second difference worth noticing. The small publishers won around 40 breakouts between roughly 40 different accounts — almost exactly one each. The established publishers won around 55 breakouts between about 30 accounts, so several of them won more than once. The most active single publisher passed 1,000 installs with eight separate plugins in twelve months.
What this means: for a small publisher, reaching 1,000 installs was usually a one-off event. For an established one it was closer to a repeatable process.
“Small publisher” does not mean “small company”
This is the part that matters most, and it is easy to miss. A publisher with one plugin is not always a solo developer working alone.
Look through the small publishers that reached 1,000 installs this year and you find a hosting company, a payment gateway, a card network, a legal-text service, a shipping platform, a national delivery firm and a famous web archive. Each one published its first WordPress plugin. Each one already had customers who wanted it.
Only about a third of these winners even had their own product website listed. The rest were mostly genuine independents — and they are the smaller part of an already small group.
What this means: the thing that carries a plugin past 1,000 installs is an existing audience. A big plugin portfolio is one way to have one. An existing customer base is another. Starting with neither is the hardest version of the problem, and it is also the most common.
What to do with this if you are planning a plugin
None of this says a first plugin cannot work. Around 40 of them did this year. But they did it with something behind them, so it is worth being honest about what you have before you start.
- Name your audience first. Not “WordPress users” — the actual group you can already reach. A client list, a mailing list, a forum you post in, an existing product’s customers.
- If you have no audience, build the audience first. That might mean one useful free tool, or writing about the problem for a few months before the plugin exists.
- Treat your first plugin as the start of a portfolio. The repeat winners are repeat winners partly because each plugin gives the next one a place to be announced.
- Solve a problem someone already pays to solve. The companies in this data launched into demand they could already see in their support queue.
The main conclusion
Most new plugins come from publishers with almost no track record. Almost none of the installs do.
The gap is not about code quality, and it is not about waiting longer. It is about who can tell people the plugin exists on the day it ships. That is the part worth planning before the first line of code.
Data note: Figures come from this site’s copy of the public WordPress plugin directory, read on 1 October 2026, covering plugins added in the twelve months to that date. A publisher is identified by their WordPress.org account, so a company using several accounts is counted as several publishers, and plugins that have since been closed are not counted. WordPress publishes install counts in broad bands, so these are approximate by nature. Rounded figures are used throughout to keep the focus on the pattern. See the methodology page for details.