Five Reasons our Plugin Sales Fell, and What We Can Do About Each One

Barn2 founder and CEO Katie Keith says the company’s new plugin sales fell 48% between the 12 months ending September 2024 and September 2026, while renewal revenue rose 32%. Renewals now make up 74% of revenue, helping limit the overall decline to 6%. Paid Memberships Pro and GravityKit reported similarly steep drops in new-sales revenue.¹

Keith argues that the biggest factor is the collapse of organic search. Barn2’s organic visits fell 86% in the first seven months of 2026 compared with 2024, with how-to searches down 91%. At the same time, the site’s conversion rate improved from 1.2% to 1.8%, suggesting the larger problem is discovery rather than conversion.¹ Pew Research Center found that Google users clicked traditional results less often when AI summaries appeared, and question-style searches were especially likely to trigger them.²

She also points to a smaller WordPress and WooCommerce market, AI making simple utility plugins easier to replace, and more features moving into core. Current W3Techs data shows WordPress at about 58.6% of sites with a known CMS, while WooCommerce has continued adding extension-like functionality directly into core.³⁴

Keith’s response is to reduce Barn2’s dependence on Google and WordPress alone. The company is putting more emphasis on partnerships, email, marketplaces, Shopify, Wix, SaaS products, and acquisitions. Her broader point is that plugin companies now need to ask both whether their products still have a defensible future and whether the marketing channels that built them still work.