I measured 7,032 WordPress plugins to find out how anyone gets their first install

I shipped a plugin to the WordPress.org directory. It got zero installs. That is not a complaint, it is the normal outcome. Roughly 19% of all plugins in the directory never pass zero installs , which is more than 10,500 of them. But I wanted to know why , and whether the answer was "your plugin is bad" or something structural. So instead of reading marketing advice, I queried the directory API and counted. Everything below is reproducible. The API is free, needs no key, and every query I used is in the article. The short version Search is a two phase system, and phase one is a hard filter , not a ranking. If a single word of the user's query is missing from your listing, you are excluded from that search entirely. Phase two is where you lose, and it is ranked partly on active installs . That is the cold start trap. Of the plugins that broke out recently, 88% had distribution before they started . The two behaviours that actually correlate with breaking out from nothing are release cadence and resolving support threads , which are two of the five phase-two ranking inputs and the only two a plugin with no installs can move. WordPress.org gives plugin authors no analytics whatsoever . No listing views, no impressions, no click-through. Anyone who tells you confidently what makes people click install is guessing. How search actually works The best-documented account traces to WP Tavern's 2017 coverage of the directory relaunch, quoting Greg Brown, the Automattic data engineer who built it. It runs on Elasticsearch, and it has two phases. Phase one builds the candidate pool. It matches against title, excerpt, description, tags, slug, author name and contributor names. Critically: all search keywords must appear somewhere, or the plugin is excluded from the result set. Not ranked low. Excluded. Phase two sorts that pool by last update date, compatibility with the current core version, active installs, percent of support tickets resolved, and average rating. That split ma