62,851 live plugins name exactly one person in the contributor list. That is about 85% of the directory. One plugin names nobody. Together they account for about 130 million of the roughly 325 million active installs the directory reports — about 40%.
This is a different cut from how many plugins a publisher already has. That piece looked at new plugins in a single year, and at the size of the account behind them. This one looks at the names on the plugin page itself, across every plugin the directory still serves.
Two names change the odds
Plugins that list two or more people are about 15% of the directory and hold about 60% of the installs. The chance of reaching 10,000 installs rises with the length of the list.
| People credited | Plugins | Share of installs | Reach 10,000 installs |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | About 63,000 | About 40% | About 1 in 50 |
| Two or three | About 9,500 | About 31% | About 1 in 15 |
| Four to ten | About 1,600 | About 22% | About 1 in 5 |
| Eleven or more | 75 | About 7% | About 1 in 2 |
A plugin with four to ten credited people is about ten times as likely to pass 10,000 installs as a plugin with one name on it. The 75 plugins with eleven or more people average about 290,000 installs each. The biggest-teams board is the top of that last row. Jetpack sits at the far end of it, with 130 credited contributors.
What this means: the directory is a solo activity. The install base is not. Most of the sites running a plugin from this directory are running one that names more than one person.
A name on the page is not a headcount
The contributor list is whoever has a WordPress.org profile on that plugin. It is not a count of employees, and it is not a count of who wrote the code.
A company can ship a plugin under a single account. A long list can be a firm that already had customers, with the engineers, the support staff, and the release managers all credited. The same caveat as the publisher piece applies here: the thing that shows up in the data is an organisation with somewhere to send the plugin, and the contributor count is one of the ways that organisation becomes visible.
Adding three names to a readme does not move a plugin from “1 in 50” to “1 in 5”. The plugins in the longer rows were already the ones with a team behind the release. The list records that. It does not cause it.
What this means: use the length of the credit list as a hint that more than one person is keeping the plugin alive. Do not use it as a quality score, and do not treat a single name as proof of a one-person company. The field cannot see the people who were never added to it.
What to do with this if you are the only name
- Read the odds as a base rate, not a forecast. About 1,200 one-person plugins have still reached 10,000 installs. The rate is about 1 in 50, which is uncommon and not impossible.
- A second credited person is already a different row. Plugins with two or three names reach 10,000 installs about 1 time in 15.
- Look at the other signal of an organisation. The publisher piece, on how many other plugins the account already has, is the matching count for new launches.
- Judge the plugin on its own page. A long credit list can sit on a plugin you still should not install, and a single name can sit on one you should.
The main conclusion
About 85% of live plugins credit one person. Those plugins hold about 40% of reported installs. The other 15% — the plugins with two or more names — hold about 60%. The longer the list, the more often the plugin has passed 10,000 installs, from about 1 in 50 with one name to about 1 in 2 once eleven people are credited.
The list is a trace of who showed up to be named. It is the closest thing the directory publishes to “was there a team,” and the installs follow it.
Data note: Figures come from this site’s copy of the public plugin directory, read on 4 October 2026. One plugin with a contributor count of zero is folded into the “one person” prose and left out of the “exactly one” count of 62,851. Install totals add the directory’s rounded active-install figures, so they are approximate. The rankings page lists the plugins at the top of the contributor count.