Almost 20% of WordPress.org plugins are stuck at “0+ installs”

#wordpress #webdev

While digging into WordPress.org plugin statistics, I found something surprising:

👉 Nearly 19% of all plugins never get past the “0+ installs” mark.

That’s more than 10,500 plugins basically invisible to users — almost 1 out of 5 in the entire repository.

Why does this happen?

Looking at the data and reading community feedback, a few clear patterns emerge:

🗓 Abandoned at launch — ~39% of “0 installs” plugins have identical published and last updated dates. Uploaded once and never touched again.
🛠 Built-for-myself projects — many are coded for a single website and uploaded “just in case,” but never reach broader adoption.
🔍 Discovery issues — the WordPress.org search algorithm heavily favors plugins with large install counts. New ones rarely show up.
📢 No marketing — without blog posts, social sharing, or active promotion, users never even discover them.
🗂 Tag chaos — the repository has ~57,000 unique tags, which makes plugin discovery messy and inconsistent.

As one plugin developer on Reddit put it:

“WordPress is now a business area. If you don’t invest in marketing and teams that amplify your voice, your plugin bites dust.”

Update activity

To dig deeper, I analyzed update frequency for the 10,581 plugins stuck at 0 installs.

Here’s what I found:

Category	Count	% of total
No updates > 2 years	5,224	49.4%
No updates 1–2 years	912	8.6%
No updates 90d–1y	2,503	23.6%

📊 Almost half of the “0 installs” plugins haven’t been touched in over two years.

Only about 1 in 5 show recent updates (<90 days).

Community insights

Some thoughts from plugin authors and users (via Reddit discussion):

“The repo search is beyond bad. Even if your plugin is better, people won’t find it.”
“Developers aren’t marketers. Without visibility, good plugins stay invisible.”
“Some plugins are niche — useful to one site, but irrelevant to most users.”

Is this a problem?

Some argue it’s just the nature of an open repository: anyone can upload code, most will never be used.

Others see it as a deeper issue:

Poor discoverability
Broken search
Inconsistent tagging
Lack of support for small developers

Either way, it highlights a tension in the ecosystem: visibility is everything.

What could help?

Ideas often mentioned by the community:

🔎 Advanced filters (by industry, builder compatibility, plugin type).
🗂 Unified categories instead of 57k scattered tags.
🆕 “Sort by most recent” option in WP Admin when browsing plugins.
🤖 AI-driven categorization to make discovery easier.
🤝 “You may also like” recommendations inside the repo.

Final thoughts

Nearly 1 in 5 WordPress plugins never see the light of day.

The reasons are complex: lack of marketing, poor search, abandoned projects, and tough competition.

But maybe the real lesson is this:

👉 Building a plugin is only half the journey. The other half is making sure people actually find and trust it.

💬 What do you think?