More than half. Of 52,896 plugins read from the WordPress.org directory in September 2026, 54.8 percent had not been updated in over a year, 41.8 percent not in over three years and 35.0 percent not in over five. The median plugin was last updated 530 days ago. Reach is just as thin: the median plugin reports 20 active installs.
WordPress.org publishes a last updated date and an install count on every plugin page, and warns a visitor when a plugin has gone a year without an update. Nobody publishes how much of the directory carries that warning.
| Not updated in | Plugins | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Over 1 year | 28,961 | 54.8% |
| Over 2 years | 24,277 | 45.9% |
| Over 3 years | 22,103 | 41.8% |
| Over 5 years | 18,505 | 35.0% |
The median plugin was last touched 530 days ago. The directory is not mainly a set of maintained products with a stale tail; the stale part is the larger half.
| Active installs | Plugins | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000,000 or more | 67 | 0.1% |
| 100,000 or more | 467 | 0.9% |
| 10,000 or more | 2,198 | 4.2% |
| 1,000 or more | 7,017 | 13.3% |
| 100 or more | 16,596 | 31.4% |
| 10 or more | 39,343 | 74.4% |
The median plugin reports 20 active installs. 13,553 of them, one in four, report none. WordPress rounds this figure down to a coarse bucket, so 20 means "at least 20 and under 30", but the shape is unaffected.
Median lifetime downloads are 2,913, which is more than a hundred times the median active install count. Most of what a plugin has ever been downloaded for is no longer running anywhere.
26,605 plugins, 50.3 percent, have never been rated. A rating count is the only public signal a visitor has about whether anyone else uses a plugin, and half the directory offers none.
On 2026-09-08 we paged the public WordPress.org plugin information API
(action=query_plugins) at 250 plugins per page for all 271 pages it reports, and kept
the distinct plugins returned. Every figure comes from fields the API supplies:
last_updated, active_installs, downloaded and
num_ratings. Age is measured against the collection date.
The figures on this page are free to quote and republish with attribution (CC BY 4.0). The same numbers in machine readable form: wordpress-plugin-directory.json.
sellerkit, “WordPress.org plugin directory: abandonment and reach, 2026”, 2026-09-08. https://sellerkit.namubase.com/data/wordpress-plugin-directory