This week, the wordpress.org plugins directory has started showing the approximate number of sites that currently have a plugin installed.
Until now, there was only indirect information on this. A download counter was shown – but this showed downloads of all versions of the plugin (including updates), so this number depended not only upon the number of active sites, but also upon the history of the plugin, and how often it released updated versions.
Rankwp.com used to be the go-to place to get estimates of a plugin’s install base – but we’d long suspected that their algorithm seriously under-counted the true figure (as well as producing figures that fluctuate wildly when a plugin update is released). This suspicion turns out to be correct.
The true figure can only come from wordpress.org – because wordpress.org is the place that a WordPress website sends back its “Hey – please can you tell me if there are any updates available for this plugin?” requests to.
A perfect count isn’t possible – not all sites will check for updates (some are behind firewalls), and not all sites are public Internet sites (some are private development ones). They’re also only showing figures to one significant figure – so, you can’t distinguish plugins with vaguely similar numbers of downloads. But, it’ll be pretty good – and, as I say, wordpress.org is the only place that can give an accurate figure that’s comparable between plugins.
The figure for UpdraftPlus’s free version is 300,000+ – over 3 times larger than rankwp.com’s estimation. Nobody’s yet produced an ordered ranking of most-installed plugins… this would be easy to do, just involving scraping the data from the relevant pages – we’ll be interested to see where this places UpdraftPlus when someone does that.
David Anderson (founder, lead developer, UpdraftPlus)
