GoDaddy have begun publishing a list of the top 100 plugins on their servers. We’ve been very interested!
It’s important to understand what’s being measured. It’s not the most currently installed plugins. It’s not the plugin that are most installed and activated. It is the plugins that had the most fresh activations in the last week.
i.e. If you launch a plugin and the entire universe installs it this week, and then nobody installs it the next week, then this week it will be number 1… but next week it won’t even appear on the chart. So, it’s measuring what’s trending. It’s telling us what website builders are relying on for the newest websites that they’re building on GoDaddy, right now.
I’m curious to know more of the raw figures – how many activations does a plugin actually need to get into the top 100? Plugins have jumped around a lot, and sometimes you can guess why (e.g. the latest security threat, or a sale). But I wonder how many activations actually separate position 80 from position 50, for example? They’re not sharing the raw data, so we’ll have to just wonder. Based on the stats at wordpress.org, we reckon that between 1,000 and 2,000 people are activating UpdraftPlus every day; but we don’t know how many of those are on GoDaddy.
In the 5 weeks that the chart has been going, UpdraftPlus has been in positions 34, 28, 28, 31 and 15 (going week by week). It’s interesting to see that there is a fair measure of consistency in the top 50 – plugins seem to tend to jump around by up to around 20 places, but otherwise, it’s obvious that some plugins are consistently popular from week to week. That’s hardly a surprise, but it gives us some confidence that GoDaddy’s methodology is giving indications of where the WP plugin world is currently at, and isn’t just churning out random line noise that you can’t get anything from.
As we look at the numbers over a number of weeks, we’re seeing that UpdraftPlus is being consistently confirmed as the #1 WordPress backup/restore plugin. Users believe in what we’re doing, and we’ve got plenty more to do. We all thank you for joining us on the journey and hope you’ll remain with us as we take WordPress backups to the next level. If you’ve not yet checked out our flagship product, UpdraftPlus Premium, including all our features, free UpdraftPlus Vault cloud storage (as well as access to all our other back-ends, like Dropbox, Amazon, Google, etc.), free access to 12 months of new versions, and much more, then please take a look. There’s nothing people want to back up with more than UpdraftPlus – stick with us, and together we’ll keep it that way!
David Anderson (founder, lead developer, UpdraftPlus).
