I’ll be honest — when I pushed the change to the WordPress.org Featured Plugins tab on February 28th, I had a small moment of “what did I just do.” The Featured tab loads by default on an estimated 37 million WordPress installations every time someone opens Plugins → Add New. That’s not a small surface area. That’s basically every self-hosted WordPress site on the internet, and I had just changed what they see when they get there.
I’d been thinking about this problem for a long time. The plugin directory has over 60,000 plugins. Submissions roughly doubled in 2025 — hundreds of new plugins every single week from developers who built something real, pushed it to WordPress.org, and then watched it disappear into the void because there was no meaningful way for anyone to find it. The Featured tab was the most valuable editorial surface in the entire WordPress ecosystem, and it had stopped doing anything useful for independent developers. I wanted to fix that. So I did.
The idea is straightforward: rotate eight plugins every two weeks. Not the big names. Not the plugins that already have millions of installs and don’t need the help. The newcomers — plugins under a year old, under 10,000 active installs, built by developers who are showing up, shipping quality work, and just waiting for a fair shot at visibility. Eight plugins, two weeks, then eight more. That’s it. Simple in concept. Turns out, transformative in practice.
Because the early impact data is pretty hard to ignore, and honestly, it’s the kind of thing that makes you stop and go “wait, really?” Ollie Menu Designer — a genuinely great plugin that had been quietly sitting at around 1,000 active installs — showed up in the first Featured cohort on February 28th. Within days, the install graph went vertical. Not a gradual slope. Vertical.
Matt Cromwell over at The Repository caught it first. He shared the install graph on X on March 3rd and wrote what he saw plainly: a few days at the top of the Featured Plugins screen and Ollie Menu Designer had tripled its largest single download day ever. A milestone that took the plugin months to hit in the first place — blown past in 72 hours. And it didn’t stop there. Total installs roughly doubled in less than a week, going from around 1,000 to over 2,000 active installations and climbing.
The Repository’s broader analysis was just as direct. Their takeaway was simple: placement inside the WordPress admin interface is powerful distribution. Not just useful. Not just nice to have. Powerful. The distinction matters because it’s fundamentally different from every other form of exposure a small plugin developer might chase. A blog post requires someone to be reading that blog. A social media mention requires someone to be scrolling at the right moment. A WordPress.org directory listing requires someone to already know what they’re searching for. The Featured tab doesn’t ask anything of the user. It’s just there — loading by default, every time someone opens Plugins → Add New, across all 37 million of those dashboards, in front of people who are already inside their admin and already thinking about installing something.
That’s the exact moment of intent. Not passive browsing. Not vague curiosity. Active, in-dashboard, I’m-here-to-find-a-plugin intent. For a developer whose plugin previously had no organic discovery path at all — no marketing budget, no agency relationships, no established brand — that exposure doesn’t just move the needle. It is the needle.
And Ollie Menu Designer is one plugin in one cohort. Looking at the full first two weeks across all eight featured plugins, the numbers are even more striking: over 26,000 new installs, a 622% lift over the prior period. Every single plugin in the cohort saw meaningful growth. Not a few of them. All of them. Because the demand was there all along — the plugins just had no way to reach the people who would have loved them.
That’s the part that genuinely excites me about where this goes. The experiment rotates eight plugins every two weeks. That’s 208 plugins a year getting this shot — developers who shipped something genuinely useful and now actually have a path to the audience that was always waiting for them. Some of those plugins will find their people and never look back. Some developers will keep building things they might have otherwise abandoned, because they finally saw the number move. That compounding effect — more builders staying in the game, more momentum, more confidence that shipping something good is worth it — is how ecosystems stay healthy and keep getting better.
WordPress has always had incredible talent hiding in plain sight inside its plugin directory. I just wanted to make sure some of it finally got seen. The data says it’s working. The demand was always there. The visibility wasn’t. Now it is.
| Plugin | Featured Installs | Regular Installs | Difference | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ollie Menu Designer | 11,088 | 446 | 10,642 | 2386.10% |
| Makeiteasy Slider | 4,277 | 302 | 3,975 | 1316.23% |
| Internet Archive Wayback Machine Link Fixer | 2,559 | 743 | 1,816 | 244.41% |
| Gallery Block by Galleryberg | 2,096 | 470 | 1,626 | 345.96% |
| Easy Tabs Block | 1,786 | 243 | 1,543 | 634.98% |
| MailerPress | 2,167 | 995 | 1,172 | 117.79% |
| Block Responsive | 1,207 | 212 | 995 | 469.34% |
| OptinCraft | 920 | 205 | 715 | 348.78% |
| Total | 26,100 | 3,616 | 22,484 | 621.79% |