Category Archives: News

Five billion plugin downloads!

Posted on by

A short while ago, the total number of plugin downloads from wordpress.org exceeded 5 BILLION.

Herb Miller – reporting on output from wp-top12 – 24th January 2021

Since mid October 2019, I’ve been extracting information from wordpress.org in order to find the top 12 most downloaded plugins.

The figure’s been approaching 5 billion a few days now. In my most recent extract the total download for 58,370 plugins was 5,000,078,534.

Here’s a chart of the history.

Total plugin downloads history

Continue reading →

Top 12 WordPress plugins – November 2019

Posted on by

Today, 5 November 2019, according to WordPress.org there are 54,497 plugins on WordPress.org.

That’s a decrease of over 400 plugins (was 54,927) in less than a month.

TOTAL DOWNLOADS: 3,550,985,988

was 3,492,183,046 in October 2019

In terms of Total Downloads, the top 12 plugins table, with a new column added for 2019, is:

Position move plugin 2015 2016 2019
1 up 2 wordpress-seo 23888967 37219578 203 million
2 down 1 akismet 41870866 54086058 146 million
3 up 2 jetpack 20854957 30883469 146 million
4 up 2 wordfence 10655259 22199987 136 million
5 down 3 contact-form-7 33264457 45014223 122 million
6 up 1 woocommerce 11542164 18968270 78 million
7 down 3 all-in-one-seo-pack 25340154 31222282 62 million
8 up 3 google-analytics-for-wordpress 10436289 12697215 56 million
9 new entry elementor ? ? 38 million
10 new entry wpforms-lite ? ? 33 million
11 up 1 wp-super-cache 9031498 11313369 31 million
12 new entry updraftplus ? ? 30 million
  • WordPress SEO was the first plugin to reach over 200 million downloads, on October 17th, 2019.
  • Akismet was knocked into third place by Jetpack for a while.
  • Wordfence is rising fast.
  • Contact Form 7, is the last of the 5 plugins with over 100 million downloads.
  • There are 3 new entries: elementor, wpforms-lite and updraftplus.
  • nextgen-gallery, wordpress-importer and google-sitemap-generator have fallen out of the top 12.

GROUPED BY TOTAL DOWNLOADS

Total downloads 2015 2016 2019
1->10 167 137 16
10->100 2405 1815 1391
100->1000 15307 18017 19934
1000->10000 16919 19826 22705
10000->100000 5938 6799 8022
100000->1000000 1118 1379 2026
1000000->10000000 127 180 360
10000000->100000000 11 12 38
100000000->-1000000000 5

The top 1,000 plugins have all achieved at least one third of a million downloads. They account for over 80% of the total downloads.

The top 400 plugins, with over 1 million downloads each, account for 73% of the total downloads.

MOST RECENT UPDATES

Summary of when the plugin was last updated.

Last updated 2015 2016 2019
2019 16699
2018 6206
2017 4974
2016 16996 5285
2015 16149 7292 4665
2014 6602 5429 4006
2013 4462 4092 3039
2012 3955 3773 2935
2011 3325 3235 2388
2010 3174 3121 1905
2009 2392 2349 1402
2008 1265 1247 663
2007 430 420 227
2006 61 61 33
2005 143 143 64
2004 7 7 6

WORDPRESS VERSION COMPATIBILITY

Versions of WordPress – minimum required versions and tested up to.

Version Requires 2015 Requires 2016 Tested 2015 Tested 2016
4.8 2 32
4.7 38 2 4477
4.6 226 3 5115
4.5 72 3753
4.4 57 726 3755 2962
4.3 306 552 5186 2246
4.2 342 540 3504 2334
4.1 445 675 2749 2070
4.0 1668 3069 2430 1945
3.0 to 3.9 13205 1438 15167 14131
0.70 to 2.9 23848 25222 7426 7323
Other+ 40 41 68 95
Other 2081 2269 1628 1682

STAR RATINGS

Stars 2015 2016 2019
5 12626 15275 14834
4 3810 4702 5108
3 1828 2184 2085
2 538 610 480
1 988 1119 714
0 22182 24275 14411

OTHER INTERESTING FACTS?

Number Factoid
591 Plugins using the keyword block
413 Plugins with SEO in their name
2500 Plugins with widget in their name
10% Percentage of plugins using “wp” in their name

CAVEATS

  • The latest 2019 figures were determined for 54497 plugins.
  • The REST API doesn’t provide the same level of information as the published API.