To celebrate the upcoming 20th anniversary of WordPress, Pascal Birchler, a core committer for the platform, has created a Periodic Table of WordPress Plugins. The table showcases 108 of the most popular free plugins available on WordPress.org. Birchler had previously created a similar website ten years ago, which ranked plugins by the number of active installations. The updated chart is now available at plugintable.com and features a modernized look and feel, more curation, and useful information about each plugin.
The interactive website allows users to expand each card to view more information about each plugin, including the author, install count, star rating, and the date it was first published. Approximately 57% of the plugins included have 1 million or more installs, making it easy to see the most successful WordPress.org extensions at a glance. The lowest number of active installs for plugins included in the chart is 600k.
Birchler was impressed by the stats for the Really Simple SSL plugin, which has more than 5 million active installs and a 5/5-star rating. He also highlighted Site Kit by Google as being the youngest “element” first released in October 2019, with 3+ million active installs in just over three years in the directory. The XML Sitemaps Generator plugin is the oldest among those included, released in 2005 just before Akismet.
Birchler also noted WP Multibyte Patch by @eastcoder, which offers improvements for Japanese sites, as another plugin that caught his eye. With over 1+ million installs, he wonders why WordPress core itself doesn’t have better support for multibyte characters.
For those who love the Period Table of WordPress Plugins and want to see it hanging on their wall, Birchler has set up a Shopify-powered store where you can purchase a high-quality print version. The poster comes in light and dark modes and is also available framed. Birchler plans to donate the proceeds of the store to the WordPress community.
