All About Plugins.

Welcome back to WP Trends. Things have been hectic here in the last few weeks, so May got away from me!

Acquisitions

For the second newsletter in a row, Liquid Web grabs the first paragraph with another recent acquisition. GiveWP, the popular donation plugin, has joined the Liquid Web family. The deal seems in the best interest of all involved as the whole of GiveWP, the plugin and team are all moving across where no doubt they will continue doing great work with even more support and resources at their disposal. A good deal.

Are Liquid Web done acquiring WordPress plugin businesses? I doubt it.

In contrast, I was extremely disappointed recently to see how an aquisition of a free plugin with a large install base got completely mishandled. ProfilePress acquired the WP User Avatar plugin last year, along with its 400,000+ active installs.

On paper it's a great move, find a popular plugin that solves a specific problem for a large amount of users. Add subtle upsells to your larger, more feature rich premium plugin for those users that want more. But no, the team decided this month to completely replace the WP User Avatar codebase with their full-blown membership management plugin. 🤦‍♂️

I'm still not entirely sure how they thought this switch would play out in their favour. Yes, having 400,000 active installs for their freemium plugin means they are the largest of that type around, double the size in installs of the previous market leader, Ultimate Member. But apart from the SEO bump in the plugin directory, those 400,000 users aren't likely to convert to the pro version as they no longer have the plugin that they installed.

I found the explanation from the plugin author Collins Agbonghama very unsatisfactory:

"And since I think they are complementary, I decided to merge them"

The plugin's users are equally unsatisfied. Before the pivot, the plugin had 21 1-star reviews out of its 203 total reviews. It has now received 249 1-stars. A 1085% increase, in contrast to the 18% rise in 5-star reviews in the same period. It's also affected its growth:

If you are thinking of acquiring a free plugin as a channel for your premium offerings, then this is a masterclass in how not to do it.

I shared this opportunity last month, understrap.com the theme framework was for sale. It eventually sold for $50k to an owner that sounds like they will breath some life into it.

Trends

With 58,644 plugins on the WordPress repository, the plugin ecosystem is expanding, but how many of those plugins are actively maintained?

Mihai Iova asked the same question on Twitter:

Let's dig into the numbers.

Here's the number of new plugins added to the repo each year - we are at 2,000 for 2021 so far:

That's interesting to see the dip between 2017 and 2019, and with the year to date number suggesting a further dip or at best a plateau, have we reached the saturation point in the repo, are plugin authors going down a premium-only route?

That's a good topic for another email, but for now here's the number Mihai was after.

A whopping 65% of plugins on the repo haven't been updated in the last year. 55% haven't been updated in the last two years, and 47% in the last three.

46% of plugins have zero reviews. 2% have less than 100 downloads, and 35% with less than 1,000 downloads. A massive 61% have less than 100 active installs.

This goes to show that the number of plugins on the repo is huge, but there is a much smaller number of plugins that are maintained or have traction. If you're worried that the market is too big for your plugin, you're looking at the wrong number. But be warned, the plugin repo is a graveyard of abandoned and low-impact plugins, so work hard to ensure yours doesn't become one them.

Acquisition Opportunities

Things seemed to have slowed down when it comes to WordPress businesses for sale. Larger deals are being done behind closed doors.

Here are the WordPress businesses for sale at the moment:

1. WooCommerce food delivery plugin - $250k TTM
2. WordPress theme shop - $22k ARR
3. WordPress theme shop - $6k TTM 
4. SaaS privacy-focused comment system - $2.2k TTM

(All figures are revenue based. TTM = Trailing 12 months. ARR = Annual recurring revenue)

If you want to read about the ups and downs of acquiring businesses, subscribe to Keanan Koppenhaver's newsletter.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading. If you have any feedback about the newsletter or want to chat about the WordPress ecosystem, I'd love to hear from you - just hit reply.

Till next time 👋

Cheers,

Iain Poulson Founder of WP Trends