WordPress.org added 11,384 new plugins between 18 July and 9 November 2026. That's close to a hundred a day, for four months straight. I didn't plan to count them. My plugin benchmark snapshot on makewpfast.com froze in mid-July, and when I went to refresh it, the backlog of new plugins was far bigger than I expected.
So I pulled the numbers from the WordPress.org plugin API instead. Everything below comes from that data, fetched on 9 November 2026.
How many plugins WordPress.org adds per month now
The directory lists 78,530 plugins today. In October 2026 alone it added 3,680 new ones, 6.7 times the 547 it added in October 2025. Here's how many were added each month:
From July 2024 to November 2025 the directory took in between 220 and 581 new plugins a month. Then it started climbing: 875 in January 2026, 1,662 in May, 2,164 in June.
Since my snapshot froze, it went like this:
- July 2026 (whole month): 2,470
- August 2026: 2,423
- September 2026: 3,162
- October 2026: 3,680
- November 1-9, 2026: 1,001
October 2025 had 547 new plugins. October 2026 had 3,680. That's 6.7 times more in one year. The busiest single day was 12 October 2026, with 214 new plugins approved.
Is that just closed plugins dropping out?
That was my first worry. The API only shows plugins that are still open. A plugin closed in March 2025 is gone from my March 2025 count, so older months look smaller than they really were.
I checked how fast that happens. I had a snapshot of the 14,480 newest plugins from 5 November. Four days later, 14 of them were gone from the listing. That's about 0.1%. Even if plugins disappeared at that rate all year, a year-old month would lose something like 9% of its additions, and the oldest months in the chart maybe twice that. That can't turn 547 into 3,680. The growth is real.
Almost nobody installs them
Of the 11,384 new plugins, 9,998 have fewer than 10 active installs. That's 88%. Fewer than 10 is the lowest bucket WordPress.org reports, so a lot of these are probably sitting at zero or one, and that one is the author's own site.
Only 15 of them have reached 1,000 active installs. The biggest by far is MCP Adapter with 60,000, published by the WordPress.org account itself on 2 October. It lets AI agents use a WordPress site through the Model Context Protocol. A few others in that group come from names you'd know, like Jetpack Stats from Automattic and RunCache from RunCloud.
Full disclosure: I helped. One of the 11,384 is mine, Tiny Simple Admin Notice Silencer, added on 23 September. It has 30+ active installs, which puts it in the top 5% of the new plugins. I'll take it. My other new one, Zero Blocks Given, went up on 30 May, so it doesn't count here.
So the flood is real, but most of it never reaches anyone's site. If you search the directory for something common, though, you'll be wading through it.
What kind of plugins they are
I counted the tags. The top ones:
woocommerce: 3,137 pluginsai: 868seo: 846security: 485chatbot: 378analytics: 360
WooCommerce add-ons are the biggest group, about 28% of everything new. Checkout tweaks, booking, payment gateways.
AI is the other big one. The ai tag alone covers 868 plugins. Then I counted plugins whose name or short description mentions AI, GPT, ChatGPT, LLM, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, MCP or agentic. Add the ones with AI-flavored tags like chatbot, agent or anthropic, and it comes to 1,806. That's about 16% of all new plugins, roughly one in six. The share stays between 15% and 18% every month since July, so AI plugins are growing at the same pace as the rest of the directory.
My guess for the driver: AI made writing a plugin a lot cheaper. That would explain why the volume went up across every category at once, and why so few of the new plugins find users. I can't prove that from the API, though. It doesn't record how a plugin was written.
Who is publishing them
The 11,384 plugins come from 8,249 different author accounts. Of those, 6,647 accounts shipped exactly one. Another 184 accounts shipped five or more, and together they account for 1,336 of the new plugins. The busiest single account published 23 since July.
What about speed?
I don't know yet, and I'm not going to guess. On makewpfast.com I benchmark plugins by installing each one on a clean WordPress site and measuring the memory and database queries it adds. That data set has 64,435 plugins in it, 59,330 of them benchmarked, and it froze in mid-July. Almost none of the plugins in this post have been through it.
That matters if you use WP Multitool. Its Plugin Performance Score module shows makewpfast.com benchmark data on your Plugins page, so a plugin added since mid-July most likely has no score there yet. For those, the Find Slow Callbacks module measures what actually runs on your own site, which is the better test anyway.
With 3,680 new plugins in a single month, the review team and every directory search are going to feel this. I'll restart the benchmarks and see how the new crop compares to the old one. With one in six of them built around AI, I'm curious what that does to memory and queries.
FAQ
How many new plugins does WordPress.org add per month?
In October 2026 WordPress.org added 3,680 new plugins, up from 547 in October 2025. Between 18 July and 9 November 2026 it added 11,384.
Do people actually install the new plugins?
Mostly not. 88% of the plugins added since 18 July 2026 have fewer than 10 active installs, and only 15 have reached 1,000.
How many new WordPress plugins are AI plugins?
About 16%, roughly one in six. 1,806 of the 11,384 new plugins mention AI, GPT, ChatGPT, LLM, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, MCP or agentic in their name or description, or carry an AI-related tag like chatbot, agent or anthropic.