Is The Growth Of Active Installs of WordPress Plugins Declining in 2021?

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Written By David Bisset

5 thoughts on “Is The Growth Of Active Installs of WordPress Plugins Declining in 2021?”

  1. Not that I reflect the bulk of users but personally I’ve been removing a lot of these plugins from all my client sites because they’ve become so bulky and bloated. Jetpack, for example, is one that avoid as much as I can and I’m currently in the midst of experimenting with alternatives for WooCommerce for the same reason – Automattic’s plugins all either max out my PHP workers or include a million features that other plugins do better. Yoast, Ninja Forms, Monster Insights, Envira, etc., all great plugins but when all of them are installed there’s just too much going on. It also wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of WP’s growth during the pandemic was from people who were ‘trying their hand’ at building a website and aren’t as aware of the big players in the plugin ecosystem.

  2. > It’s clear that WordPress itself continues to grow

    I am starting to wonder if the community should begin tracking other metrics to better understand the true health of WordPress. We tend to lean quite heavily on the w3techs stat (currently 42.2% of CMS powered sites) but other tools are telling a different story.

    Google trends for example shows a decline in WordPress interest that has been ongoing for 5 years (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=%2Fm%2F02vtpl,wordpress,%2Fm%2F089vdb) and Builtwith.com is also showing that WordPress hit a peak in the last 12 months or so.

  3. I am actively removing Jetpack from sites I manage. It’s too big and bloated now. It’s UI and requirement for a wp.com account are too confusing.
    I’m actively removing Contact form 7 too. It used to be my go to default on the simplest sites, now I use Ninja forms (though I may rethink that).
    Finally, I am looking for an alternative to Next gen gallery. Simply because I cannot update it (and the pro add-ons) with standard remote management tools. I think it is one of the best, but a non standard update process when you manage 100+ sites is not acceptable.

    • Hey Mike,

      Thanks for sharing your reasoning! I work at Imagely, which makes NextGEN Gallery. I wanted to chime in and share that we are in fact moving the updater we have in our premium plugins move to the default WP updater. That’s in process and should be done in one of the next updates. Unfortunately, an update with the existing updater will be required in order to get to the new version with the change (once released).

  4. HI! Steve Teare from PagePipe. We save the internet from WordPress abuse. So here are some opinions: #1: Gutenberg block editor adoption is reducing the need to add plugins for features. #2: The need for speed (as mentioned in above comments). #3: Market confusion from too many choices. #4: We suspect Covid recovery also means few people are working on their sites and out interacting with real people live and in person. #5: Confusion from panic over Google Core Web Values, in the end, not making any ranking difference. “What do I do now?”
    Those are some of our speculations about plugin decline.

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