The second round of featured plugins just wrapped. Eight plugins. Fourteen days. 28,931 total installs — up from 11,248 in the prior two-week period. That’s a net lift of 17,683 installs and a 157% increase across the board.
But the aggregate doesn’t tell the real story. The real story is what happened to the small plugins.
| Plugin | Recent 14d | Prior 14d | Lift | Lift % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DesignSetGo | 6,221 | 1,563 | 4,658 | 298.02% |
| GSlider Blocks | 3,462 | 282 | 3,180 | 1127.66% |
| Accessibility Checker | 10,961 | 8,709 | 2,252 | 25.86% |
| Lordicon | 2,083 | 85 | 1,998 | 2350.59% |
| FaeCursor | 1,967 | 93 | 1,874 | 2015.05% |
| Blablablocks Tabs Block | 1,614 | 127 | 1,487 | 1170.87% |
| Event Genius | 1,584 | 279 | 1,305 | 467.74% |
| Interactions | 1,039 | 110 | 929 | 844.55% |
| Total | 28,931 | 11,248 | 17,683 | 157.21% |
Look at Lordicon. It went from 85 installs to over 2,000 — a 2,351% increase in two weeks. FaeCursor saw a similar jump: 93 to nearly 2,000. Five of the eight plugins saw lift above 800%.
Meanwhile, Accessibility Checker — already well-established and pulling 8,700 installs before being featured — saw a 26% bump. Solid, but a completely different magnitude than what the smaller plugins experienced.
The takeaway is clear: the smaller the plugin, the bigger the impact of being featured. For plugins doing double-digit installs, the featured section wasn’t a boost. It was a launch.
So what happens when you feature brand-new plugins?
If featuring hits hardest for the smallest plugins, the obvious next move is to push it further. Feature plugins that aren’t just small — they’re new. Launched-this-week new. Barely-any-installs new. No-reviews-yet new.
That’s what we’re doing with Round 3.
Round 3: Built for the builders
Most of the plugins in Round 3 launched in the last week. We’re putting them in the featured section with essentially no install history and no social proof. We want to find out if the featured section can launch a plugin from near-zero.
This is also about the health of the community.
The contributor base has gotten smaller, and the reason isn’t complicated: you invest serious time into a plugin, ship it, and it drops into a directory of 60,000+ others with almost no path to discovery. Whether you’re doing this nights-and-weekends or as part of your business, that equation is brutal.
But the Round 2 data tells a different story. When we put small plugins in the spotlight, people showed up — in the thousands. The demand was always there. The gap was never quality or interest. It was visibility.
The featured section fixes that gap. And we want to make it the norm.
Build something great, get it in front of people. That’s the deal.
If the Round 2 trends hold — and we think they will — being featured in your first week could mean thousands of installs right out of the gate. Not after months of grinding. Not after begging for reviews. In your first week.
Now we need you
Build something.
If you’ve had a plugin idea collecting dust, or you started one and shelved it, or you’ve been wondering whether anyone would even notice — now is the time. We are actively looking for new work to feature, and the numbers speak for themselves.
The spotlight is on. Your move.