What this is
wp-rankings.com tracks growth, rankings, and active-install trends for every plugin in the WordPress.org directory, so any developer can tell at a glance whether their plugin is growing or shrinking. It’s the kind of view we all lost in 2022, rebuilt, extended, improved, and opened up to everyone.
Why we built it
In late September 2022, the active-install growth chart vanished from the plugin directory without warning. The commit cited only “insufficient data obfuscation.” For many of us, it was the single clearest signal we had that a plugin was gaining or losing ground, and a sudden dip was often the first sign a release had introduced a bug. Its removal left many developers in the dark, and the ticket requesting it back (#6511) is still open today, years later.
What’s left on WordPress.org is the popular-plugins list, ranked purely by active installs. If your plugin climbs, it’s probably growing faster than its neighbors. If it slips, it’s probably falling behind. But that list only ranks so deep. The long tail of tens of thousands of plugins effectively has no signal at all, unless you query the API and work out the math yourself.
What we built
Things WordPress.org never gave back, and a few it never offered at all.
First, we rebuilt the growth chart that disappeared in 2022, using four years of daily plugin data we’ve collected. Every plugin gets its historical growth view again, showing whether it’s rising or falling over time.
Then we went further. WordPress.org only ever published install buckets like “10,000+” or “100,000+”, ranges too wide to track real movement. So we built the first estimate of how many active sites each plugin actually runs on, narrowing those buckets into real numbers with confidence ratings. A plugin listed as “10,000+” might be running on 19,400 sites, and now you can see that.
And we added two things developers usually have to pay for: WordPress.org search rankings for the keywords that matter to your plugin, and side-by-side comparison against your competitors. Most services that offer these put them behind a paywall or a signup form. Here they’re just there, free, no signup. Open a plugin and look, then claim your plugin to customize the keywords and competitors.
A GeoDirectory showcase
This site runs on our GeoDirectory plugin and our Blockstrap theme: 70,000+ listings on an ordinary server, sub-second loads, and a 95 PageSpeed score, with no caching or special optimization.
It’s free
This is a small project we’re sharing with the community. If it’s useful to you, please pass it along to a plugin-developer friend.