The most popular WordPress plugins

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Written By Brian Krogsgard

13 thoughts on “The most popular WordPress plugins”

  1. I too am happy to see download numbers be replaced by install numbers, those are the ones that really count. As you mention, it will help those in the media like I discern between a major announcement to push to people to update a plugin or something a little less low key, even though they’re all important.

    It’s about time Plugin authors get better stats. It will help them stay in touch with their user base. The more analytic information to base decisions on, the better.

    • I completely agree. I’ve been always hoping for an estimated number of actual installs. It definitely helps motivate plugin development. Download stats tracked everything including minor updates so you weren’t getting the true picture

  2. Great post, very thorough! Your information about data accuracy and collection is really helpful and appreciated.

    I’m really looking forward to this change, like Jeffro said – it’s about time. Not just for developers, but as you said for users “the download count keeps old plugins relevant far longer than if active installs were the prominent number.”

    So, I guess there’s a 1M+ club now? 🙂

  3. > discrepancy between downloads and active installs is huge

    Bare in mind the old download counter also counted updates. If you had 100,000 installs and did 100 updates over 100 days, you’d have just over 10 million downloads. So alot of the inflation comes from plugins where either they’re old and have done alot of updates over their long history, or newer but do really frequent updates

  4. Great news, so excited by this!

    As a side note, they seem to have changed it so the maximum showing is now 1+ Million. For example both WordPress SEO and All in One SEO show as 1+ Million for me, rather than the number shown above.

    • Well spotted. 🙂

      The first iteration of these numbers are very end-user focussed, we wanted to separate plugins into broad groups.

      The next iteration will potentially involve more granular numbers for plugin authors, though we’re still testing the stats to make sure they’re accurate enough for that. As was mentioned in the article, when the numbers are over one million, we’re seeing some variation in day-to-day stats that we’re still figuring out.

      In the mean time, these new stats serve their primary purpose of giving end-users a rough idea of a plugin’s popularity, and it gives reporters a more accurate number to use when referring to a plugin’s install base.

  5. Holy schmoly! I had no idea my plugins were so popular until seeing that list. I assumed the number of active installs was something like 1% of the total downloads, but the number is WAYYY higher than that!

  6. This is definitely progress. I used to go to rankwp.com to see estimates of plugins’ popularities. I had long-suspected that it was seriously underestimating the popularity of UpdraftPlus – for which it showed 100,000 active users. This turns out to be a correct suspicion – wordpress.org is indicating >300,000. (Which would get it into your list above. 🙂 ).

    • As noted in the article, it’s not a comprehensive list of the most popular plugins. It’s many of the most popular, as well as other notable ones I thought to include. It’s not a direct representation, but a manual sample.

  7. Showing Active install is good for accuracy, As WordPress Plugin developer really needed to know how many people using their plugin instead of just downloading.

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