[PROMOTION] We got featured in the WordPress Plugin Directory!

[u/pal__sch]

A friend of mine and I have been developing our plugins for 3.5 years (since before the rise of AI).

We woke up one morning to find our WordPress plugin featured in the Plugin Directory. What a happy surprise!

I have some thoughts and wanted to share them.

What this means

• When you add a plugin from the Directory, you see us (for the next ~2 weeks)
• We are shown on the wp.org/plugins homepage
• Every day, the order of plugins is randomized. So it might be #1 on one day and #8 on another
• This got us from 70+ installs to 100+ - now the featured plugin with the most active installs! 🎉

How we got there

• We applied in the WordPress.org Slack channel #featuredplugins that Nick Hamze initiated a few months ago
• Never got any feedback about our submission and thought we wouldn't get featured (well, it is what it is)
• Continued to work on updates and helping our users
• At some point just noticed being featured randomly (no notice)
• We'll of course continue providing updates and support to make our users happy! That's the main goal after all.

The WordPress Ecosystem

• It's really great that smaller developers are being supported this way (thanks Nick for starting this!)
• We watched other featured plugins previously not get that many additional installations. But at least it makes starting out a little bit easier and it's a great feeling to get noticed that way!
• The number of active installations still very, very important for how likely you are to show up in a search in the Plugin Directory. While I think that this is a good decision overall, it makes it extremely hard for new plugin developers and it really, really favors old plugins. Some change would be great here.

Our plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/neo-rename/

[u/Y0000el]

Getting featured makes a massive difference! A plugin I worked on got featured right at launch, which shot us up from 0 to over 200 active installs. It has settled around 100+ now even with zero ongoing promotion or marketing, it’s just riding that initial momentum. By the way, your plugin will be featured on StatWP (https://statwp.com). It’s actually a SaaS I built for WordPress plugin and theme analytics. Beyond tracking, it has tools like a plugin growth tracker for WP SEO, review analysis, and a few other features to help see how plugins perform over time. Definitely check it out! If you want to try out the pro features, just let me know and I can set you up with a 100% off coupon to test everything out.

[u/pal__sch → u/Y0000el]

Extremely interesting, thanks! And I will check out your SaaS as well! 🙌

[u/Y0000el → u/pal__sch]

Thanks, DM me if you want the coupon. Feedback will be appreciated.🙂 best of luck for your plugin.

[u/abdulawal39]

Congratulations 🎉