The read · 26 Oct 2026
Hostinger Tools has the reach and the weakest reviews
One giant sits on top of this category, with a long bench of well-kept specialists behind it. Hostinger Tools has 3M+ active installs, about a fifth of everything installed here, and it ships often: its last release was five days ago. Its reviews are the weakest of the top dozen, though. It averages around 3.6 stars, while every plugin below it in the top twelve sits between 4.3 and 4.9. That gap suggests many of its installs come from somewhere other than people picking it out of the directory.
The chasing pack is in good working order. Loginizer pairs 1M+ installs with 4.8 stars and shipped 17 days ago, and Redux Framework released two weeks ago. The slowest of the leaders is White Label CMS. It runs inside the admin on 200K+ sites, and its last release was 109 days ago.
Maintenance mode is crowded, and the incumbents aren't sleeping
Four of the top eleven build maintenance or coming-soon pages: Maintenance, SeedProd, LightStart and CMP. Together they hold well over 2M installs, and three of them shipped within the last month. New entrants keep turning up anyway. Simple Maintenance Mode White Screen and Cool Coming Soon both reached 100+ installs this quarter. Against leaders this active, that's a fight over scraps, and it's hard to see a newcomer reaching the top of this niche.
Google reviews widgets are the niche that's moving
GR Widget went from 10+ to 800+ installs in 90 days, the sharpest climb in the category. ReplyOnTheFly and iWEBAPP, two other Google reviews widgets from different makers, grew from almost nothing to the 60 to 90 range over the same stretch. When several unrelated plugins built on the same idea climb at once, that points to real demand, though the data doesn't show what's driving it. Unlike maintenance mode, there's no entrenched leader here yet.
A thinning tail underneath
Category downloads fell 10% over the window and average under 800 a month per plugin, which is thin. Of the plugins we have enough data to judge, about two in three are in poor health. The biggest decline among established plugins is Hide Admin Toolbar, which slipped from 9K+ to 7K+ installs. Two plugins with 10K+ installs left the directory: WP Testimonials closed on 2 October and Countdown Timer on 6 October, neither with a recorded reason.
At the top, frequently updated incumbents make this a moat. The openings are in small niches like reviews widgets, where demand is showing up before any leader has formed.
