Downloads, keyword rankings and daily history, collected on your own WordPress site.
atec Plugin Monitor: Follow the progress of your WordPress pluginsPublishing a WordPress plugin creates a second job: understanding what happens after the release.
You check the downloads. You look at the active installation count. Perhaps you search for a keyword to see where your plugin appears. Each check gives you a useful number, but following several plugins means repeating the process across multiple pages.
And a number you see today does not tell you how it has changed.
I wanted a clearer view of my own atec plugin portfolio, so I built atec Plugin Monitor: a WordPress plugin for developers who want to follow their plugins’ performance and keep the history on their own site.
The starting point is simple. Enter a WordPress.org author username to import that author’s public plugins, or add individual plugins by their directory slug or URL. You can also add other plugins for comparison.
The monitored plugins do not have to be installed on the site running the monitor. One WordPress installation can follow a whole portfolio using public WordPress.org data.
The portfolio overview brings lifetime downloads, recent downloads, rounded active installation counts, ratings and current versions together. Open a plugin to explore its download history, recorded installation milestones and rating changes. Select a second plugin to compare their development in the same charts.
This is useful when a single number needs context. A busy download week is easier to assess when you can see the preceding weeks, the versions you released and how a comparable plugin performed over the same period.
Release history records when the monitor first observed each version. Where WordPress.org provides it, version distribution also shows which version branches are in use. These observations help you examine changes around a release; they do not prove that the release caused them.
Search visibility is another part of the picture. Plugin Monitor checks configured keywords against the first 100 results returned by WordPress.org’s plugin search API. Each keyword is tracked with an explicit language setting, so English and German observations remain separate.
Directory tags provide the first keywords when a plugin is added. You can then add the phrases you want to follow, such as “object cache” or “backup.”
Repeated observations turn those searches into a history. You can see whether a keyword position improved, declined or moved outside the top 100. These are observed search positions; the public data does not tell us which searches actually led to downloads.
Building that history is the central purpose of the tool.
Available daily download history can be imported from WordPress.org. Rankings and installation milestones need to be recorded as we observe them. Checking on Monday and again on Friday gives us two observations, with a gap between them.
Daily collection runs in the background through WordPress cron and saves the results in your WordPress database. You can also refresh manually. On a quiet site, a hosting scheduler makes collection more reliable, because ordinary WP-Cron depends on WordPress receiving requests.
The figures also need to be read for what they represent. Downloads include updates and repeat downloads. They are not a count of new users. Active installations are published in rounded milestones: a figure such as 3,000+ does not reveal an exact installation count.
Plugin Monitor keeps those distinctions visible. It does not turn rounded figures into precise estimates or label installations divided by lifetime downloads as a measured conversion rate.
The collected history stays in the monitoring site’s database, with CSV exports for further analysis or reporting. No tracking code is added to your customers’ websites, and no visitor analytics scripts are added to your public pages. The tool monitors public directory data.
atec Plugin Monitor is available through atec Plugins and uses the existing atec PRO license system. It requests statistics directly from WordPress.org, without a separate paid analytics API account.
For me, its practical value is having the whole portfolio in one place and keeping a record I can return to. That makes it easier to decide which plugin deserves attention, which keywords need a closer look and which changes are worth investigating.
*Download and learn more: *atecplugins.com
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