The WordPress Ecosystem is Growing: New Plugin Submissions Have Doubled in 2025

This year, the number of plugins submitted has grown by 87% compared to last year

🌱 We have great news from the Plugins team. The submission of new plugins in WordPress has almost doubled this year, helping the WordPress ecosystem to grow.

The WordPress developer community is celebrating as they maintain and increase their submissions to be reviewed and published in the WordPress directory.

As you can see in the graph below, we detected this increase since last September, and we can observe the impact of AI as well as achievements made by the team, such as having automated tools and improvements to the internal Scanner, which, in our view, have contributed to the rise in 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 submissions to the official directory.

The Rise of AI 🤖 in the Plugin Directory

🤓 It’s clear that AI is influencing plugin submissions to the directory. Here, we analyze plugins that have “AI” in their title, showing the use of Artificial Intelligence integrated into WordPress.

As seen in this chart, growth is exponential, with many plugins directly using AI to offer features within the directory.

If we were to group them by functionality and ordered by number of submissions, we’d have these categories:

💬 Chatbots / Virtual Agents
✍️ Content Generators
🛒 Ecommerce / WooCommerce
🔍 SEO
🖼️ Multimedia Generation (images, 3D, etc.)
📝 Forms / Inputs
✨ Summaries / Highlights
❓ FAQ / Q&A Generators
🌐 Translation / Multilingual
🏷️ TaxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. Management (categories/tags)
📋 Titles and Metadata

We highly appreciate developers betting on WordPress to include Artificial Intelligence and improve integration and functionalities for users.

The Impact of AI on Plugin Development

Artificial intelligence has become a key tool to speed up and improve plugin development in WordPress. From writing code to generating ideas, here are some standout ways AI is helping:

• Code Assistance: AI tools assist developers by providing contextual suggestions, code snippets, and guidance on the use of WordPress-specific functions, hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. and APIs.
  
• Code Debugging and Review: AI can analyze your code and suggest improvements for performance, security, or WordPress standards compliance. It can help understand Plugin Check Plugin warnings and offer specific solutions.
  
• Auxiliary Content and Documentation: Automatically generate parts of documentation, FAQs, changelogs, or tutorials for end users.
  

Improvements to the Team’s Internal Scanner

We’ve upgraded our internal tool focusing on three pillars: better detection, more examples, and AI integration.

We revamped the tool that assists our manual reviews by catching more issues and checking more detection points, while customizing examples to make it easier for developers to find solutions.

Remember, the main security issues stem from lack of sanitization, escaping, and nonce usage.

Finally, we’ve added AI to detect duplicate or similar plugin names in the directory, making the team more productive.

Free Tool for WordPress Developers

Since last year, we have the Plugin Check Plugin tool, which lets you review your own plugin. Plugin Check Plugin is an official tool that automatically checks if your plugin meets WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ directory requirements and best practices.

More info is available in the detailed introductory post.

Since September 2024, Plugin Check Plugin has been integrated for automatic reviews directly on WordPress.org, improving review speed and reducing issues by 41% when approving a plugin.

Team Effort: Less Average Waiting Time

Even though we’ve received twice as many new plugin submissions, we should applaud the team’s dedication to keeping the time for first reviews low.

A short waiting time for plugin review encourages developers to publish in the directory and offers many advantages:

• Faster publishing cycle: Less time between idea and public availability.
  
• Better developer experience: Less waiting to validate ideas reduces frustration, increases motivation, and strengthens the WordPress community.
  
• Incentive to innovate more: Our community becomes more competitive with an agile process, encouraging experimentation and initial version releases.
  

This year, we are also managing to keep the average waiting time for the first review at a minimum. We work hard every day to maintain this commitment and avoid long delays that could discourage new plugin development.

This post was written by @davidperez and reviewed by @frantorres and @rabmalin