WordPress.org Is Approving 5x More Plugins Than a Year Ago. Here’s the Data

Last updated 18 October 2026. Figures come from the WordPress.org Plugins Team’s weekly posts and the public plugins API, read on that date. The full dataset is linked at the end.

WordPress.org is approving about five times as many new plugins a week as it did a year ago. In September 2025 the Plugins Team’s weekly updates showed an average of 143 approvals a week. In September 2026 it was 724. The first two weeks of October were higher again, at 938.

That’s a big change for a directory that grew slowly for years, and it explains a few things people have been asking about: why the plugin directory suddenly feels crowded, why “new” searches are full of plugins with almost no installs, and why plugin updates now arrive a few hours after the author announces them. We pulled every weekly stats post the team has published since 2023, plus 27,000 plugin records from the directory itself, to see what’s actually going on.

The numbers, week by week

Every week the Plugins Team posts a short stats update on make.wordpress.org/updates. Two lines matter here: “Plugins requested” (new plugins submitted for review) and “Plugins approved”. Here’s the monthly average of those weekly figures:

Source: Plugins Team weekly posts on make.wordpress.org/updates, monthly average of the weeks that had a post. Some weeks have no post.

Two things stand out. Submissions are up about 3.4 times in a year. Approvals are up about 5 times, so the team isn’t just receiving more plugins, it’s also getting through them faster. Its own June update gives the reasons: three new reviewers joined in April, and “AI-assisted checks did help us handle this volume.” It also says that in May 2026 the team did nearly 3,000 initial reviews in one month, against about 1,100 in May 2025.

Checking it against the directory itself

Weekly posts are one source. The directory is another, so we checked whether the two agree.

When we ran our full census of the plugin directory on 17 August, the WordPress.org plugins API listed 69,838 plugins. On 18 October it listed 76,069. That’s 6,231 more in 62 days, or about 700 a week, which fits the weekly approval numbers once you take off the plugins that get closed.

We also walked the API’s “newest” list back to late 2023 and counted plugins by the month they were added:

September 2026 had 3,164 new plugins. The weekly posts say about 724 approvals a week that month, and 724 times 4.3 weeks is about 3,100. Two different sources, nearly the same answer.

Put another way: 19,224 of the 76,069 plugins in the directory today, about one in four, were added in the last 12 months.

Why is this happening?

The Plugins Team has said it plainly. Back in May 2025, when submissions had roughly doubled, its post on the growth said “we can observe the impact of AI”, and listed chatbots and content generators as the most common kind of AI plugin being submitted. AI coding tools make it much quicker to go from an idea to a working plugin, and a lot more people are doing exactly that.

We can’t tell from the data how much of each plugin was written by AI, and we’re not going to guess. What we can say is that the curve bends sharply in spring 2026, and the team that reviews these plugins puts it down to AI.

“The queue is nearly zero” vs “4,779 in the queue”

This one confuses people, so here’s the simple version. The weekly post for 12 October says there are 4,779 plugins “in the queue”. The June post says the review queue went “back to nearly zero”. Both are true, because they’re counting different things.

Most of that 4,779 is plugins the team has already reviewed and sent back, waiting for the developer to fix something and reply. Only 30 had not been looked at yet. So if you submit a plugin today, the wait for a first review is short. The slow part is usually the back and forth after it.

What happens to a new plugin, step by step

1. Submission. The developer uploads a zip. It gets checked automatically for common problems.
2. Review. A reviewer, helped by automated tools, reads the code and either approves it or emails the developer a list of fixes.
3. Waiting on the author. This is where most plugins sit. Nothing moves until the developer fixes the listed issues and replies.
4. Approval. The plugin gets an SVN repository and shows up in the directory once the developer uploads it.
5. Every update after that goes through a security check. This part is new, so it gets its own section.

The new part: AI now checks every plugin update

A plugin is only reviewed by a person once, when it’s first submitted. After that, the developer can push updates whenever they like. That’s always been a weak spot: a plugin can be fine today and ship a vulnerability, or malicious code, next month.

On 9 September the Plugins Team explained how it now handles this. In plain words:

• Every update waits 6 hours. Since 5 June, every plugin and theme release goes through a “cooldown” before it’s offered to sites, including one-click updates from your dashboard. This is why an update can appear in your dashboard a few hours after the developer announces it.
• During those 6 hours it gets scanned. The changes are analysed by “several AI models together with Jetpack Scan”, and the results are combined into a security score.
• High-risk updates are blocked automatically. They never reach your site. The developer gets an email with the findings and has to publish a fixed release.

The post gives a real example. On 28 July, a backdoor was committed to a plugin with around 20,000 active installs. The scan flagged it, and because the release was still inside the 6-hour window, the bad version was never sent out through WordPress.org updates. The plugin was closed 26 minutes after Wordfence told the team about it.

A few honest limits, from the same post: it doesn’t say which AI models are used, the blocking threshold isn’t public, and false positives are “low, but not zero”. A high score also doesn’t mean someone did it on purpose. An accidental vulnerability can score as high as malware. And this only covers updates delivered through WordPress.org. Premium plugins that update from their own servers aren’t part of it.

What this means if you run a WordPress site

• More choice, more noise. With one in four plugins less than a year old, the “newest” and search results are full of plugins nobody has tried yet. Of the 19,224 plugins added in the past 12 months, 4,295 have reached 10 or more active installs so far.
• New isn’t bad, but check before you install. Look at active installs, when it was last updated, and whether the support forum gets replies. Our guide to spotting an abandoned plugin walks through the checks.
• Updates are a bit safer than they were. The 6-hour scan won’t catch everything, but it caught at least one real backdoor before it shipped. Keeping auto-updates on for plugins from WordPress.org is still the right default for most sites. We looked at why 2026 has had so many WordPress security releases in a separate piece.

If you make plugins

If a release gets blocked, the Plugins Team’s advice is simple: read the findings in the email, fix them, and publish a new version. A fixed release that scores below the threshold goes through the normal cooldown. You can appeal a finding you think is wrong, but the team says a fixed release “is almost always faster” than waiting for a manual review. If you haven’t had an email, you don’t need to do anything.

How we counted

We collected every weekly stats post the Plugins Team (earlier the Plugin Review Team) has published on make.wordpress.org/updates through its public REST API, and copied the figures exactly as posted. Monthly figures are the average of the weeks that had a post. The posts don’t say exactly what period each figure covers, so treat them as the team’s own weekly snapshot rather than a precise count. Directory totals and the plugins-by-month table come from the WordPress.org plugins API (info 1.2, “new” list), read on 18 October 2026. “10 or more installs” means the API reports a non-zero count. It shows 0 for fewer than 10, the same as the “Fewer than 10” label on plugin pages.

Two biases to keep in mind. Plugins that were closed no longer appear in the API, so older months in the second table are undercounted, which makes the growth look a bit bigger than it is. And newer plugins have simply had less time to pick up installs, so we don’t compare install rates between old and new months.

Download the data: wordpress-plugin-growth-2026-10.zip (0.5 MB). It has all 139 weekly posts with links, every plugin added since November 2023, and the monthly table. Free to reuse, a link back is appreciated.

Frequently asked questions

How many plugins are in the WordPress plugin directory in 2026?

76,069 on 18 October 2026, according to the WordPress.org plugins API. That’s up from 69,838 on 17 August 2026. About one in four were added in the last 12 months.

Why are plugin updates delayed on WordPress.org?

Since 5 June 2026, every plugin and theme update waits in a 6-hour cooldown before WordPress.org offers it to sites. During that time it is scanned by several AI models and Jetpack Scan, and high-risk releases are blocked automatically.

How long does WordPress.org plugin review take now?

The first look is quick. On 12 October 2026 only 30 submitted plugins were waiting for a first review. Most of the 4,779 plugins in the queue were waiting for their own developers to fix issues and reply.