Update on the status of the team – June 2026

A quick recap

Back in March we published Contribute to the Plugins Team!, where we explained that you were submitting plugins faster than ever, and that we needed more hands on deck to keep up.

You answered. We received a wonderful response from the community, selected a first group of candidates, and started their training. Today we want to introduce the people who completed that process, show you what their contribution has already achieved, and let you know that the form is open again for anyone who wants to join the next round.

Welcome to our new reviewers!

After roughly two months of onboarding and mentoring, three new members have joined the team and are already reviewing plugins and replying to authors every week. Please join us in welcoming:

• Marcel Tannich (@mardroid)
• Shiva Shanker (@shivashankerbhatta)
• Shameem Reza (@shameemreza)

Their work has been essential to the stability of the review queue. Beyond the reviews themselves, having more reviewers sharing the load means other members can devote more time to projects that improve the directory for everyone, such as Plugin Check and our internal scanner tooling. A healthy queue is not just about clearing a backlog, it is what makes the rest of the team’s work possible.

You can find them, and the rest of us, on the team page.

What happened to the queue

The best way to thank our new contributors is to show what changed. Here is how the review queue evolved through the first half of 2026, alongside the number of new plugins you submitted each week.

The story in numbers:

• February — the warning sign. The queue was already climbing: around 301 plugins at the start of the month and 580 by the end. The existing reviewers were able to review many plugins, but not as many as you were submitting. The number of submissions in February was double that of February 2025 and quadruple that of February 2024.
• March — we asked for help. We opened the call for new members. Meanwhile submissions held at around 500 per week, and the queue kept growing.
• April — onboarding, peak, and recovery. The new reviewers joined the team in early April. By mid-April the queue reached its highest point, roughly 1,050 plugins — and then it fell rapidly to hit zero within a few weeks.
• May — a record month. Submissions climbed again to a new record of around 700 per week (That’s an increase of 2.7 times compared to 2025, and 5 times compared to 2024). This month team carried out more 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 than ever before and by a wide margin: nearly 3,000 initial reviews in a single month. For perspective, that’s about 5% of the entire directory. In the same month a year earlier, the figure was around 1,100.

In other words: the team absorbed a rising tide of submissions and cleared a huge backlog at the same time. This was achieved thanks to the efforts of both existing and new team members. You are still increasing the number of plugins you submit, and besides plugin reviews we also have many more emails to manage regarding all kind of queries about the directory, its use and guidelines.

AI helps — but people are essential

We’ve continued to lean on automated tooling to make reviews faster, and AI-assisted checks did help us handle this volume. But we want to be clear about something: these tools support reviewers; they don’t replace them.

Judgement calls, conversations with authors, security context, manage of guideline violations and the many edge cases that don’t fit a pattern all still depend on experienced humans. This is a combination of tooling and committed people working together.

The application form is open again

The team is in better shape, but submissions keep increasing, we have new challenges ahead and want to be future-proof. As we announced in March, we’re opening a second round of applications. If you’d like to help keep the plugin directory healthy, secure, and reliable for the millions of sites that depend on it, we’d love to hear from you.

There are still two ways to contribute:

• As a volunteer reviewer — you can help reviewing plugins, replying to authors, and helping us improve our processes. Our team will guide and train you; the training period takes about two months. Tasks and requirements are mentioned on the original post.
• As a sponsoring organization — by contributing the time of people from your organization, or by supporting volunteers who are (or could be) on the team. If you don’t know anyone to sponsor, we’ll help you find them.

The deadline to apply for this round is 26 June 2026.
If you already submitted it back in March, you don’t need to do it again, we have your submission and it will be taken into account.

I want to apply to join the Plugins Team »

Thank you

To Marcel, Shiva, and Shameem: thank you for the time, care, and energy you’ve already put in. To the reviewers who mentored them, the rest of the team and to the sponsors who help volunteers to devote their time and cover costs such as the intensive use of AI: thank you. And to everyone who submits and maintain plugins making the plugins directory a trusted place for extending WordPress’s functionality.