Movers

Secure MCP Server for Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI providers posted the strongest tier climb of the window, up nine net crossings to 3K+ installs. xSpeed Cache, which pairs MCP support with caching and CDN features, reached the same 3K+ tier, and YLabs AI Assistant Connector climbed to 900+. All three package a way for WordPress sites to talk to AI assistants, which suggests site owners are starting to wire MCP into their installs, though the plugins are still small enough that this could just as easily be early testers rather than a wider shift.

BeyondSEO and ThinkRank AI SEO both moved up several tiers, with ThinkRank now past 10K+ installs. Both lead with AI-assisted work on schema, sitemaps and meta tags rather than manual editing, which likely reflects steady demand for SEO tools that automate the technical layer.

Classic Editor crossed from 8M+ to 9M+, still the largest plugin outside WordPress core itself. Widgets for Google Reviews passed the 1M+ mark, and SiteGuard WP Plugin, Redis Object Cache and SureRank SEO each moved up a tier. None of these changed recently; their growth says more about the size of the WordPress install base than about anything new in the plugins.

On the losing side, the plugins dropping tiers are small and scattered across categories, with nothing tying them together yet.