71,132 — counted one by one from the directory's own API on 2026-08-31, not taken from a stats page.
The directory's API returns a different total depending on which listing you page through: browsing by newest reports a larger population than browsing by popular, and the gap is several thousand plugins. The difference is the plugins with no install base at all — a popularity ranking has nothing to sort them by, so it does not rank them.
The number at the top of this page is a count of everything found by enumerating both orderings and removing duplicates. Anyone quoting a single round figure is almost certainly quoting the smaller one without knowing it.
Install counts are reported by the directory in buckets, so each figure is a floor.
| Active installs | Plugins | Share of the directory |
|---|---|---|
| none reported | 24,203 | 34% |
| 1,000 or more | 7,019 | 9.9% |
| 10,000 or more | 2,199 | 3.1% |
| 100,000 or more | 467 | 0.7% |
| 1,000,000 or more | 67 | 0.1% |
34% of the directory has no reported install base at all, and only 9.9% has reached a thousand. The headline number is real, but as a measure of what is available to actually use it is wildly generous.
By the year each currently-listed plugin was added. Plugins later removed are not here, so earlier years are undercounted.
| Added | Plugins | |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 4,211 | |
| 2017 | 3,844 | |
| 2018 | 3,693 | |
| 2019 | 3,744 | |
| 2020 | 4,130 | |
| 2021 | 3,481 | |
| 2022 | 3,233 | |
| 2023 | 1,866 | |
| 2024 | 3,325 | |
| 2025 | 6,030 | |
| 2026 (part year) | 12,428 |
Submissions have risen sharply. January 2025 took in 460 new plugins; July 2026 took in 2,495. What is causing that is not in this data and is not asserted here — the timing coincides with code generation becoming nearly free, and that remains a hypothesis. What the data does support is that the share of new plugins reaching any users at all has fallen just as steeply, which is set out in the census.
This gets asked alongside the first question and deserves a straight answer: there is no number. Twenty well-maintained plugins will do less harm than three that stopped shipping in 2021. What matters is what each one does on every page load, and whether anyone is still fixing it.
That second half is checkable. The scanner reads the plugins a WordPress page declares in its own asset URLs and grades each by how long since its last release — free, no signup. The 35,729 plugins above that have gone quiet include plugins on hundreds of thousands of sites.
api.wordpress.org/plugins/info/1.2, enumerated in full rather than sampled, on 2026-08-31. Two passes over two orderings, deduplicated by slug.300,000, never 312,481. Every figure here is therefore a floor.