The second Featured Plugins round ran for fourteen days with eight plugins. They recorded 28,931 total installs, up from 11,248 in the previous two weeks. That’s an increase of 17,683 installs and a 157% increase across the board.

But the aggregate doesn’t tell the real story. The real story is what happened to the small plugins.

PluginRecent 14dPrior 14dLiftLift %
DesignSetGo6,2211,5634,658298.02%
GSlider Blocks3,4622823,1801127.66%
Accessibility Checker10,9618,7092,25225.86%
Lordicon2,083851,9982350.59%
FaeCursor1,967931,8742015.05%
Blablablocks Tabs Block1,6141271,4871170.87%
Event Genius1,5842791,305467.74%
Interactions1,039110929844.55%
Total28,93111,24817,683157.21%

Look at Lordicon. It went from 85 installs to over 2,000, a 2,351% increase in two weeks. FaeCursor went from 93 to nearly 2,000. Five of the eight plugins increased by more than 800%.

Accessibility Checker had 8,700 installs in the previous period and saw a 26% increase. The smaller plugins saw much larger percentage gains.

What stands out: the smaller the plugin, the bigger the impact of being featured. For plugins doing double-digit installs, the featured section wasn’t a boost. It was a launch.

So what happens when you feature brand-new plugins?

If the smallest plugins benefit most, I’d like to try featuring plugins that are new. Launched-this-week new. Barely-any-installs new. No-reviews-yet new.

That’s what we’re doing with Round 3.

Round 3: Built for the builders

Most of the plugins in Round 3 launched in the last week. We’re putting them in the featured section with essentially no install history and no social proof. We want to find out if the featured section can launch a plugin from near-zero.

This is also about the health of the community.

The contributor base has gotten smaller, and the reason isn’t complicated: you invest serious time into a plugin, ship it, and it drops into a directory of 60,000+ others with almost no path to discovery. Whether you’re doing this nights-and-weekends or as part of your business, that equation is brutal.

But the Round 2 data tells a different story. When we put small plugins in the spotlight, people showed up, in the thousands. The demand was always there. The gap was never quality or interest. It was visibility.

The featured section fixes that gap. And we want to make it the norm.

We want to help new work find users.

If the Round 2 pattern holds, a new plugin could get thousands of installs in its first week.

Submit your plugin

Build something.

If you’ve started a plugin or have an idea you’ve been putting off, we’d like to see it. We’re looking for new work to feature.