What Changed Across the WordPress Plugin Market in August 2026

The first issue of The Rivale Diff looks at changes across the WordPress plugin market during August 2026. Rivale recorded 65.9 million downloads across the top 12,500 plugins during the week of August 17, the highest weekly total of the trailing year. Across the four measured weeks of August, downloads reached 218.5 million compared with 184.3 million in July.

The report also tracks early WordPress 7.1 adoption. Twelve days after the August 19 release, 2,560 of the top 12,500 plugins had declared compatibility, or 20.4%. Among the top 100, 33 had not yet declared support, including WooCommerce, Jetpack, and WPForms.

Activity remains concentrated among the most popular plugins. Half of the top 1,000 released an update during August, compared with 15% of plugins ranked 5,001 through 12,500. Rivale also recorded 2,444 new plugins entering WordPress.org during the month, with AI-tagged plugins appearing 3.2 times as often among new arrivals as across the directory overall.

The broader maintenance picture is much quieter. Of the 67,106 plugins listed on WordPress.org at the end of August, 31,639 had gone at least two years without an update, representing 47.1% of the directory.

Footnote

1. Rivale.io, The Rivale Diff, Issue 1: September 2026: https://rivale.io/reports/diff/issue-2026-09/