Year End Summary – 2018

Well 2019 is almost here so it’s time to look at a years worth of pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party reviews.

Everything

Here’s the chart of everything for the whole year. That gap in January-March is due to a snafu in the system. It wasn’t properly recording anything, so we weren’t able to collect stats.

Highs and Lows

Due to the above gap, our ‘least’ for the weeks are a little off, but you’ll get the general idea of how much we review a week:

	Requested	Rejected	Closed	Approved	Pending
Most / week	281	99	1171	149	730
Least / week	101	2	9	36	566
Average / week	164	21	341	87	651
YEAR TOTAL	7095	1062	13034	3752	566

What it Means?

We can see that roughly 52% of all submitted plugins are actually approved.

Why are only about half of all plugins approved? I could give you a lot of math explanations, but the crux of it is this: people don’t reply to emails.

Around 35-40% of plugin submissions are pended, either for more information or for code issues, and the majority of those simply never finish a review.

This year, though, we have an abnormally high number of closed plugins (see those gold spikes). This comes from a lot of cleanup of unused plugins (ones where code was never committed) as well as plugins with email-bounces. Due to GDPR, many email servers changed their reporting so we’re finally getting some accurate data on bounced emails.

Of the closed plugins, about .003% of developers reached out to us about them, and of those, the majority were because emails were out of date. This is why I’m always harping on people to make sure their account emails work and don’t auto-reply or bounce.

If your email bounces, we’re not going to email you or hunt you down to figure out who’s supposed to own a plugin. It’s not an efficient use of our time for people who aren’t maintaining their accounts. We’re aware it’s not very nice, but since our accuracy rate is well into the 99th percentile, it’s more effective to close the plugin.

What’s the take away from this? Check your emails. If you submitted a plugin and didn’t get an automatic reply telling you it was received and what the plugin slug was, then you’re having trouble getting our emails and you should add plugins@wordpress.org to your email’s never-spam list. If you did get that email, count 7 days from that. You will have another email from us by then, either as an approval or a rejection (which always comes with a reason why).