The read · 2026-08-31
The category's biggest plugins still exist to opt out
Eight years into the block editor, the two largest plugins in the Blocks category are Classic Editor and Classic Widgets, holding 9M+ and 2M+ active installs between them. Add Advanced Editor Tools and Disable Gutenberg and you have a top ten where the opt-out camp outweighs almost everything built to extend the editor. Classic Editor alone accounts for 41% of the category's 22.1M installs.
That's not a decaying position either. Classic Editor shipped 95 days ago and carries a near-perfect user rating, so it's maintained, not abandoned. Classic Widgets hasn't been touched in 266 days, which for a plugin whose only job is to restore an old screen is closer to finished than neglected.
The builders are healthy and the ceiling is low
Among plugins that actually add blocks, the leaders are in good shape. Kadence Blocks, Spectra Legacy, Extendify and Otter Blocks all shipped inside the last three weeks and sit high on rating and maintenance. Otter is the best-kept of the group. None of them has crossed into the millions, though, and Kadence at 600K+ is a fraction of the Classic Editor base.
So the health picture doesn't tell a story of neglect. 946 of the 1,680 tracked plugins score in the top two bands of our maintenance measure, and only two are outright failing. The problem for a challenger isn't weak incumbents. It's that the incumbents are attentive and the audience for any single block plugin is small.
Nothing is breaking through
The growth list this quarter is a set of plugins nobody has heard of moving between very small numbers. Flexa Block reached 1K+ installs from nothing, and MATE Recently Viewed Products went from 300+ to 800+. Those are the strongest climbers in a category of 1,680 plugins. On the other side, Post Layouts fell from 2K+ to 900+ in August, the only decline large enough to notice.
Three plugins left the directory this window: BoldPost on 2026-08-17 for reasons wp.org didn't record, and two on 2026-08-13 at their authors' request, one of which had 100+ installs. Small exits, no pattern worth reading into.
Category downloads rose 12.6% over the window and 8.8M downloads landed in the last 30 days, so interest is real. It's just distributed across 1,680 plugins at roughly 5,263 downloads each. That's a market with plenty of activity and no gap at the top. Anyone entering now is competing for the long tail, and the long tail is where the movement stays.
The category's biggest plugins still exist to opt out
Eight years into the block editor, the two largest plugins in the Blocks category are Classic Editor and Classic Widgets, holding 9M+ and 2M+ active installs between them. Add Advanced Editor Tools and Disable Gutenberg and you have a top ten where the opt-out camp outweighs almost everything built to extend the editor. Classic Editor alone accounts for 41% of the category's 22.1M installs.
That's not a decaying position either. Classic Editor shipped 95 days ago and carries a near-perfect user rating, so it's maintained, not abandoned. Classic Widgets hasn't been touched in 266 days, which for a plugin whose only job is to restore an old screen is closer to finished than neglected.
The builders are healthy and the ceiling is low
Among plugins that actually add blocks, the leaders are in good shape. Kadence Blocks, Spectra Legacy, Extendify and Otter Blocks all shipped inside the last three weeks and sit high on rating and maintenance. Otter is the best-kept of the group. None of them has crossed into the millions, though, and Kadence at 600K+ is a fraction of the Classic Editor base.
So the health picture doesn't tell a story of neglect. 946 of the 1,680 tracked plugins score in the top two bands of our maintenance measure, and only two are outright failing. The problem for a challenger isn't weak incumbents. It's that the incumbents are attentive and the audience for any single block plugin is small.
Nothing is breaking through
The growth list this quarter is a set of plugins nobody has heard of moving between very small numbers. Flexa Block reached 1K+ installs from nothing, and MATE Recently Viewed Products went from 300+ to 800+. Those are the strongest climbers in a category of 1,680 plugins. On the other side, Post Layouts fell from 2K+ to 900+ in August, the only decline large enough to notice.
Three plugins left the directory this window: BoldPost on 2026-08-17 for reasons wp.org didn't record, and two on 2026-08-13 at their authors' request, one of which had 100+ installs. Small exits, no pattern worth reading into.
Category downloads rose 12.6% over the window and 8.8M downloads landed in the last 30 days, so interest is real. It's just distributed across 1,680 plugins at roughly 5,263 downloads each. That's a market with plenty of activity and no gap at the top. Anyone entering now is competing for the long tail, and the long tail is where the movement stays.
