The state of WordPress plugins

Who is winning, who is fading, which markets are already lost, and where there is still an opening. Rebuilt from our own daily data on 78,360 plugins. Comparing 2026-11-03 against 2026-10-04.

The read

Forms is the directory's largest market by download volume, with 2516 tracked plugins competing for 21,818,100 downloads a month.
Admin & Utilities is growing fastest, up 170% on the previous window.
Membership is contracting, down 44.1%.
AI plugins now number 3567 of the 78,360 tracked, taking 9.8% of all downloads. The median AI plugin is 6 months old.

Sort by

Winning

Biggest active-install gains, established plugins (10k+ installs, 10+ reviews, no integrity flags)

Losing

Steepest active-install declines over the same window

How much of the directory is AI now

3567

AI-tagged plugins tracked

19.1M+

active installs

9.8%

of all downloads we track

6 mo

median age

Fastest-growing AI plugins

Agent Abilities for MCP – Connect Claude and ChatGPT with Permission Controls and Audit Log 800+ +74.7% WPSummarize – AI Summaries with key takeaways for your posts 90+ -7.1% NPC Slug Genius 10+ -11.1% GEO Optimizer Lite 20+ -28.4% GhostChat – Live Chat, AI Chatbot & Customer Support 10+ -31%

The competitive landscape

Every tracked category, by monthly download volume. "Consolidated" means one plugin holds 60%+ of a mature category's installs and it isn't growing; a leader in a still-growing category isn't counted.

Category	Plugins	Downloads · 30d	Per plugin	Leader share	Growth	Verdict
Forms	2516	21.8M	8.7K	42%	-13.8%	Crowded
AI	3403	21.3M	6.3K	54%	+29.6%	Crowded
eCommerce	9789	17.2M	1.8K	33%	+13%	Crowded
SEO	2231	17.1M	7.7K	51%	-5.6%	Crowded
Security	1779	15.3M	8.6K	19%	—	Crowded
Performance	1805	15M	8.3K	29%	+3.9%	Crowded
Backup	558	13.2M	23.6K	33%	—	Thin
Page Builders	1895	10.6M	5.6K	15%	-41.1%	Crowded
Email & Marketing	2127	10.5M	4.9K	31%	-43.6%	Crowded
Analytics	1834	10.5M	5.7K	40%	—	Crowded
Blocks	2527	7.9M	3.1K	37%	-3.4%	Crowded
Media	3294	6.8M	2.1K	11%	+11%	Crowded
Privacy & Consent	915	5.9M	6.5K	18%	+39.8%	Crowded
Admin & Utilities	5902	4.6M	782	21%	+170%	Crowded
Booking & Events	1844	3.7M	2K	23%	+36.7%	Crowded
Payments	1685	3.1M	1.8K	27%	+42.1%	Crowded
Social	1835	2.6M	1.4K	21%	-20.2%	Crowded
Multilingual	498	2.5M	5K	25%	—	Crowded
Login & Users	2208	2M	927	38%	-14.3%	Crowded
Chat & Support	1180	2M	1.7K	23%	-36.7%	Crowded
Content & Feeds	1199	1.4M	1.2K	32%	-41.8%	Crowded
Search	980	1.4M	1.4K	38%	+30.1%	Crowded
Membership	300	673.9K	2.2K	35%	-44.1%	Crowded
Education	281	585.5K	2.1K	22%	-1.1%	Crowded

Breaking out

Biggest install jumps in the last 30 days

UpdraftPlus: WP Backup & Migration Plugin 29 Oct 2026 3M+ → 4M+ Polylang 7 Oct 2026 800K+ → 900K+ Polylang 11 Oct 2026 800K+ → 900K+ Polylang 13 Oct 2026 800K+ → 900K+ Fluent Forms – Customizable Contact Forms, Survey, Quiz, & Conversational Form Builder 7 Oct 2026 700K+ → 800K+ Fluent Forms – Customizable Contact Forms, Survey, Quiz, & Conversational Form Builder 15 Oct 2026 700K+ → 800K+ SiteGuard WP Plugin 23 Oct 2026 500K+ → 600K+ Post Views Counter 7 Oct 2026 100K+ → 200K+ LuckyWP Table of Contents 21 Oct 2026 90K+ → 100K+ Internal Link Juicer: SEO Auto Linker for WordPress 23 Oct 2026 90K+ → 100K+

Rotting in place

Big install bases running on code untouched for over two years

Layout Grid Block 200K+ 3y stale Health Check & Troubleshooting 200K+ 2y stale Limit Login Attempts 200K+ 4y stale WooSidebars 100K+ 3y stale Search & Replace 100K+ 2y stale Easy Google Fonts 100K+ 5y stale Display Posts – Easy lists, grids, navigation, and more 80K+ 2y stale BackUpWordPress 80K+ 3y stale Disable REST API 80K+ 3y stale Title Remover 70K+ 5y stale

What WordPress itself runs on

via wordpress.org · refreshed yesterday

The PHP, WordPress, database and language split across every install that reports to wp.org. This is the environment a plugin has to survive in, not the one on the developer's laptop.

33% of WordPress installs run a PHP version that no longer gets security fixes. Dropping support for old PHP means dropping that share of the market.
0% are already on WordPress 7.2; the rest trail by anything from one release to a decade.
MariaDB has overtaken MySQL as WordPress's database: 61% vs 39%.
53% of WordPress runs in a language other than English. An untranslated plugin is invisible to that share.

PHP version

PHP 8.3 28%

PHP 8.2 23%

PHP 7.4 15%

PHP 8.4 10%

PHP 8.1 9.3%

PHP 8.5 6.1%

PHP 8.0 3.4%

PHP 7.3 1.3%

Everything else 4.1%

WordPress version

WordPress 7.1 65%

WordPress 7.0 6.9%

WordPress 6.9 6.4%

WordPress 6.8 5.1%

WordPress 6.7 2.5%

WordPress 6.6 1.3%

WordPress 6.4 1.2%

WordPress 6.5 1.2%

Everything else 11%

Database

MariaDB 10.11 20%

MariaDB 11.8 16%

MySQL 8.0 13%

MySQL 5.7 12%

MariaDB 11.4 9.9%

MySQL 8.4 9.3%

MariaDB 10.6 8.5%

MySQL 5.5 3.6%

Everything else 7.7%

Language

English (US) 43%

Japanese 6%

Spanish (Spain) 5.7%

German 5.7%

French (France) 4.6%

Portuguese (Brazil) 3.8%

English (UK) 3.3%

Italian 3.2%

Everything else 25%

Built from Plugin Pulse's own daily crawl of the top 78,360 plugins. Momentum figures compare active-install counts between the two dates above. Plugins carrying an integrity flag are excluded from the winners board, since manufactured installs are not growth. How this works.