Every plugin listed on WPFolks now has an Analytics section: installs, downloads, rankings and four health checks, refreshed from WordPress.org every day.
There is also a new Plugin Rankings page. It ranks more than 6,200 WordPress plugins every day, and 968 of them are built by folks in the community.
Both are free, like everything on WPFolks.
Why plugin analytics
WordPress.org shows a plugin’s numbers as they are today: active installs, total downloads and a star rating. That is a snapshot. It does not say whether a plugin is growing, how well it is looked after, or how it compares with others that do the same job.
Two things make the raw numbers hard to read:
- Active installs come in rounded buckets, and WordPress.org no longer publishes how they change over time.
- Every update counts as a download, so download totals jump in release weeks whether or not anyone new installed the plugin.
Plugin Analytics records the numbers every day and does the comparing, so a plugin page answers the questions folks actually ask before they install something.
What each plugin page shows
Open any plugin on WPFolks and tap Analytics in the section tabs. The examples below are from GiveWP, the donation and fundraising plugin.
Highlights. Two or three plain sentences at the top sum up what the numbers say. For GiveWP: “The most installed of 19 tracked plugins tagged Donation.”
Health checks. Four checks a careful site owner makes before installing a plugin:
- Actively maintained: a release in the last six months.
- Tested with current WordPress: no more than one WordPress release behind.
- Support questions answered: at least 80% of support threads resolved in the last two months, or nothing open.
- Well rated: four stars or more, from at least five ratings.
Each check shows the number that decided it. GiveWP passes all four: a release 3 days ago, tested up to WordPress 7.1.3, 16 of 17 support threads resolved and 4.6 stars from 708 ratings. A plugin with fewer than five ratings is not marked down for that. The check is left out until there are enough ratings to count.
Momentum. Four tiles: active installs, downloads this week against the week before, downloads in the last 30 days with the trend, and all-time downloads.
Downloads per week. Up to a year of weekly downloads from WordPress.org, with 3 month, 6 month and 1 year views. A line marks the typical week, so a release spike is easy to tell apart from real change. The same numbers are available as a table.
Where it stands. The plugin’s rank by active installs, trend, downloads this week and rating. It also shows the rank among tracked plugins that share each of its WordPress.org tags, such as “#1 of 19 tagged Donation”. A position shows once a plugin reaches the top half of a ranking.
Active installs over time. WordPress.org only publishes today’s install count. WPFolks now records it every day, so every plugin builds an install history from 14 October 2026 onward. The chart appears once a plugin has two weeks of records.
Plugin Rankings
The Plugin Rankings page covers the 5,000 most popular plugins on WordPress.org plus every plugin listed on WPFolks. Four ways to sort:
- Most installed
- Trending: downloads on a typical day this month, compared with the month before
- Downloads this week
- Best rated: from at least 20 ratings
Filter by tag, or tick “Only plugins by folks” to see how the community stacks up. Plugins built by folks carry a Folk badge.
For plugin authors
Your numbers on your profile. The Plugins Authored tab on your profile opens with a summary of every plugin you list: total active installs, downloads in the last 30 days and how many are trending up, with a row for each plugin.
Alerts when something changes. WPFolks lets you know when one of your plugins passes an install milestone, gets new ratings, has more unresolved support threads, or falls two WordPress releases behind on “Tested up to”. Alerts arrive in your notifications on wpfolks.org and as push notifications in the WPFolks app. Turn them off any time in Settings, under Notifications, “Your plugins’ numbers”.
Your plugins in the weekly digest. The weekly digest now carries a “Your plugins this week” section for folks who list plugins, and a “Plugin movers” section for everyone.
Monday movers. Every Monday, Folks Bot posts the week’s movers to the community feed: plugins by folks that are rising, new install milestones, and what is trending across WordPress.org. Authors get a mention.
How the numbers work
- Where the data comes from: WordPress.org’s public plugin data and download statistics, refreshed once a day.
- Which plugins are covered: the 5,000 most popular plugins on WordPress.org and every WordPress.org plugin listed on WPFolks. Plugins sold outside WordPress.org have no public numbers, so their pages do not show Analytics.
- Why installs read “20,000+”: WordPress.org rounds active installs down into buckets. WPFolks shows them exactly as published.
- What “typical day” means: the median day of the period. A single release day cannot pull it up the way it pulls up a total.
- Why Trending leaves some plugins out: the public Trending list needs about 100 downloads on a typical day, because small numbers swing too much to compare fairly. The “Only plugins by folks” view drops that bar, so smaller community plugins still show up.
List your plugin
Plugin not on WPFolks yet? List it once, and its Analytics section fills in within a day. The listing form takes the WordPress.org slug, and pasting the plugin’s WordPress.org link works too.
Ideas for more stats? Post them in the feed with #ideas.