We Checked 60,000 WordPress Plugins to Find the Ones Still Growing. They Share One Thing. wp-rankings.com

Plugin growth looks random from the outside.

One plugin explodes, another with better code sits flat for years, and the usual explanation is some mix of luck, timing, and “it’s just a better product.”

We wanted to know if that’s actually true, and we’re in a decent position to check. wp-rankings tracks every plugin in the WordPress.org repository, with 4 years of daily data behind it.

So we ran an experiment.

We took the traditional plugin categories, the ones that have existed for years: eCommerce, SEO, forms, newsletters, membership, LMS, booking, security, backup, page builders, and accessibility.

For each one, we pulled the plugins that are actually growing right now. Steady growth, not a one-week spike, minimum 3,000 active installs, filtered straight from our data.

That gave us 11 plugins across 10 categories. (One category had nobody growing at all, which turned out to be a finding in itself. More on that later.)

Then we did the part the data can’t do for us.

We researched each plugin by hand: who builds it, what they ship, how they market, where their installs actually come from.

YouTube, blogs, newsletters, communities, the company behind the plugin, the whole footprint.

We expected a mix of reasons. Better product here, clever pricing there, good timing somewhere else.

Instead, one answer explained all 11.