Which WordPress plugins are making real money now?

Is there still serious money in WordPress plugins today?

Yes. WordPress plugins can still become multi-million-dollar software businesses today, but simply entering the WordPress market is much less attractive than the platform’s enormous size makes it look.

WordPress remains huge. W3Techs still finds it on roughly 40% of all websites and well over half of websites using a known content-management system. Even after years of competition from Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and newer website builders, no other CMS comes close to that installed base.

Developers clearly still see an opportunity. According to the WordPress Plugins Team’s latest full-year report, it reviewed 12,713 plugin submissions in 2025, 40.6% more than the year before. Approvals rose even faster, from 3,259 to 5,415. Weekly submissions, which had averaged about 150 a year earlier, were running around 330 by the end of the period.

That creates an unusual market. WordPress already gives plugin makers access to tens of millions of websites, yet thousands of new competitors keep arriving while WordPress itself is no longer gaining CMS share the way it once did.

The money is still there. Getting a piece of it has become harder.

Indicator	Latest useful figure	What it tells us
WordPress share of all websites	Roughly 40%	The installed market remains enormous
Plugin reviews in 2025	12,713	Developer supply is growing quickly
Plugin reviews vs. previous year	+40.6%	Competition is still intensifying
Plugins approved in 2025	5,415	Thousands of new products enter the ecosystem
Approval growth	+66.2%	New plugin creation is accelerating faster than WordPress itself

Why can’t we simply rank WordPress plugins by revenue?

We cannot reliably rank the biggest WordPress plugins by revenue because most of the companies making serious money do not publish plugin-level financials.

Elementor currently says its technology has been used on more than 22 million websites. WordPress.org still shows more than 10 million active Elementor installations. WPForms says it has more than 6 million active installs. Wordfence protects millions of WordPress sites. Yoast also sits above the 10-million-install threshold.

None of those numbers tells us exactly how much money each plugin makes.

The problem gets worse once large portfolios enter the picture. Awesome Motive owns WPForms, AIOSEO, MonsterInsights, WP Mail SMTP, SeedProd and several other WordPress products. Newfold owns Yoast. group.one owns WP Rocket and Rank Math. Their parent companies do not break out enough product-level revenue for us to say with confidence that one plugin makes $25 million while another makes $40 million.

Even apparently simple calculations can go badly wrong. WP Rocket currently reports around 389,000 customers and more than 5.5 million websites optimized. Its cheapest annual plan is around $60. Multiplying 389,000 by $60 would create a revenue estimate above $23 million, but we do not know how many of those customers are currently paying, what plans they use, whether the number includes historical customers or how renewals affect pricing.

So we need to be stricter. Where actual revenue is public, we can use it. Where it is private, we can still look at paying customers, installations, pricing, acquisitions, renewal models and the size of the surrounding company.

That is enough to identify where serious money is being made without inventing a fake revenue leaderboard.

Is Elementor still one of the biggest WordPress plugin businesses?

Yes. Elementor is currently one of the clearest examples of a WordPress plugin turning into a much larger software company.

WordPress.org still reports more than 10 million active installations. Elementor itself now says more than 22 million websites have been built with its technology, up from the figures it was publishing previously.

More interestingly, Elementor no longer behaves like a company whose main business is selling a premium page-builder upgrade.

Its current product lineup stretches across hosting, domains, AI, image optimization, transactional email, accessibility, website management and performance tools. Elementor One bundles several of these services together. The company has also introduced an AI coding product and is pushing its new generation of the Elementor editor.

The original plugin has effectively become the front door.

That strategy makes sense because website creation is one of the deepest workflows in WordPress. Once an agency has built dozens of client sites around Elementor, the company gets repeated chances to sell hosting, AI tools, optimization and management products into the same customer base.

There is even a large business layer sitting on top of Elementor itself. Ultimate Addons for Elementor currently exceeds 2 million active installations, while Essential Addons and ElementsKit are above 1 million each. Several smaller Elementor extensions have hundreds of thousands.

A WordPress plugin supporting multiple million-installation businesses around itself is operating at platform scale.

Is WP Rocket actually making serious money?

Yes. WP Rocket is one of the strongest examples today of a WordPress plugin turning a narrow technical problem into a large premium software business.

WP Rocket currently reports about 389,000 customers and more than 5.5 million websites optimized. More than 50 people work on WP Rocket and the wider WP Media operation, according to the company’s current press information.

The business is especially interesting because WP Rocket never needed a huge free WordPress.org funnel. Customers pay to use the main product.

That removes one of the biggest uncertainties in plugin analysis. Five million free installations could produce very little revenue. Hundreds of thousands of people described by the company as customers are much stronger evidence of a large commercial operation.

WP Rocket has also expanded beyond the original caching plugin. It sells RocketCDN as a recurring service and sits alongside Imagify inside WP Media. group.one acquired WP Media in 2021 and later added Rank Math to its WordPress portfolio.

The scale also took years to build. Around WP Rocket’s eighth anniversary, the company reported roughly 1.7 million websites using the product and around 196,000 users. Its current footprint is several times larger on the website side and substantially larger on the customer side.

For a plugin with no mass-market free edition, that trajectory is difficult to dismiss. WP Rocket is clearly making real money now.

Are Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO still making SEO plugins a big business?

Yes. SEO remains one of the richest WordPress plugin categories, although the money is now split among several powerful competitors.

Yoast remains enormous, with more than 10 million active installations on WordPress.org. Newfold Digital acquired Yoast in 2021 and folded it into a portfolio that already included major hosting and web-presence brands.

Rank Math has taken a different route. The plugin was much younger than Yoast but passed 4 million active installations and was acquired by group.one in 2023. That gave group.one both a major SEO product and WP Rocket, one of the best-known WordPress performance products.

AIOSEO makes the category even more interesting. Awesome Motive acquired it when the plugin already had more than 2 million active installations, then rebuilt the product and integrated it with the rest of the company’s WordPress portfolio.

Three separate buyers have therefore put money behind three large WordPress SEO businesses: Newfold with Yoast, group.one with Rank Math and Awesome Motive with AIOSEO.

There is a straightforward reason the category keeps supporting large products. Businesses continue to care about search traffic, while premium SEO plugins can sell much more than basic metadata fields. Schema, WooCommerce SEO, local SEO, internal linking, content optimization and AI features create several reasons to upgrade.

SEO plugins are fiercely competitive these days. They are also still valuable enough for major software groups to keep owning and expanding them.

Are WordPress form plugins quietly some of the biggest winners?

Yes. WordPress form plugins are among the strongest businesses in the ecosystem because a form can quickly become part of a company’s sales, payment and customer-data workflow.

WPForms reported more than 6 million active installations and 305 million lifetime downloads in its latest annual review. That puts it among the most widely installed WordPress plugins of any type.

Its commercial opportunity goes far beyond contact forms. WPForms sells features around payments, lead generation, surveys, user registration, signatures, calculations and integrations with marketing and CRM platforms.

Gravity Forms follows the same underlying logic with a different distribution model. It has spent years as a premium-first WordPress product and now connects forms with payments, email, CRM systems and other business workflows.

Fluent Forms has become another substantial competitor, passing 600,000 active installations while sitting inside a broader WPManageNinja ecosystem that includes FluentCRM, FluentSupport, FluentCommunity, FluentAffiliate and FluentCart.

Forms become much harder to replace once they start moving money or customer information between systems. A basic contact form can be swapped in an afternoon. A payment form connected to conditional logic, email sequences, a CRM and internal automations is another story.

That gap is where a large part of the money comes from.

Is Wordfence still a strong WordPress plugin business?

Yes. Wordfence still has one of the strongest monetization setups in WordPress because security gives customers a clear reason to keep paying every year.

Wordfence has more than 5 million active installations on WordPress.org. Its paid Premium license currently costs $149 per site per year, with discounts as customers add more licenses.

The premium product sells something customers can understand immediately: faster firewall rules and malware signatures, blocklists, country blocking, security logs and premium support.

This category also has unusually strong renewal logic. A customer may decide that a design widget is no longer worth $49 next year. Security protection is harder to switch off because the risk returns immediately.

Wordfence also benefits from the size of its network. Millions of protected websites generate threat information that helps the company identify attacks and vulnerabilities across WordPress.

Defiant, the company behind Wordfence, does not publish enough financial information for us to calculate current Wordfence revenue. Still, five million-plus installations, $149 annual pricing and a recurring security problem put Wordfence firmly among the WordPress products with serious commercial potential.

Is WooCommerce still the best place to build a paid WordPress plugin?

WooCommerce remains one of the most attractive WordPress markets for paid plugins because its customers are businesses with money already moving through their websites.

Woo currently says WooCommerce powers about 4.1 million live stores, based on StoreLeads data from 2026. Its official marketplace carries more than 1,500 products, and Woo estimates that around 90,000 developers, builders and creatives work around the ecosystem.

That merchant base changes plugin economics.

A normal website owner may hesitate to spend $100 on a convenience feature. A store doing $500,000 in annual sales can justify the same price very quickly if a plugin improves checkout, subscriptions, product configuration, bookings, shipping or average order value.

Woo also provides a direct commercial channel. Marketplace vendors currently receive 70% of net product sales. Woo tracks new sales, subscriptions, renewals and other commercial metrics for those sellers.

There is plenty of competition, and Woo keeps absorbing useful features into the core product. Generic extensions therefore face more pressure than before.

The better opportunities now tend to sit deeper inside merchant operations, where replacing the plugin could affect orders, revenue or staff workflows.

Can a small WordPress plugin company still make $1 million a year?

Yes. Barn2 proves that a focused WordPress plugin company can still generate well above $1 million annually without anything close to Elementor-scale adoption.

Barn2 disclosed $1.71 million in WordPress plugin revenue for 2025 from 18,783 sales. Total company revenue reached $1.79 million, meaning plugins generated about 96% of the business.

The company has also passed $9.7 million in lifetime plugin sales.

Those numbers give us something rare in WordPress: actual revenue rather than installations or founder hints.

Barn2’s average order value was $95.79. More importantly, 61% of plugin revenue came from annual renewals, against 38% from new sales and 2% from upgrades.

Studio Wombat gives us a second useful example at a different scale. The WooCommerce plugin developer sold 3,997 new licenses in 2025, down from 4,265 the year before, yet revenue still grew by 8%.

These companies are much smaller than Elementor, Yoast or WPForms. They show that seven-figure outcomes do not require millions of free installations.

Plugin business	Recent disclosed result	What stands out
Barn2	$1.71M WordPress plugin revenue	A specialist portfolio can clearly reach seven figures
Barn2	18,783 plugin sales	Revenue does not require millions of customers
Barn2	$95.79 average order value	Roughly $100 purchases can support a substantial business
Studio Wombat	Revenue +8%	A smaller WooCommerce portfolio can still grow
Studio Wombat	3,997 new licenses	Thousands, rather than millions, of buyers can be enough

Are WordPress plugin renewals now more important than new sales?

For mature WordPress plugin companies, renewals are becoming extremely important, especially now that acquiring fresh buyers is getting harder.

Barn2 gives us the cleanest numbers. New plugin sales fell 17.8% in 2025. Total plugin revenue still increased slightly because 61% of revenue was already coming from renewals.

Studio Wombat saw a related pattern. New licenses dropped about 6.5%, from 4,265 to 3,997, while revenue grew 8%.

These results reveal something that installation rankings completely miss. A mature plugin company can keep growing even when fewer people buy for the first time.

Renewals also make the business much easier to plan. A company entering January with thousands of customers due to renew during the year starts from a very different position from a developer who needs to find every buyer from scratch.

As we saw above, Barn2 generated nearly two-thirds of its plugin revenue from existing customers. That is closer to recurring SaaS economics than to the old image of selling downloadable WordPress extensions one license at a time.

Is it getting harder to sell new WordPress plugins?

Yes. Selling a new WordPress plugin is clearly getting harder for many established developers, even while the healthier businesses continue making good money from existing customers.

Barn2 founder Katie Keith investigated this after seeing the company’s new sales fall 17.8%. In a survey of 33 WordPress plugin companies, she found a broad split between products that customers struggle to replace and simpler plugins with plenty of alternatives.

Two-thirds of the plugins described by their owners as difficult to replace were growing. Easier-to-replace products were much more likely to report severe declines.

The surrounding market makes that believable. WordPress approved 5,415 new plugins in 2025, 66.2% more than the previous year. Developers therefore face more products competing for attention at the same time that Google search is sending less predictable traffic and AI tools are changing how people solve WordPress problems.

Studio Wombat illustrates the discovery problem particularly well. Its site traffic dropped 28% in 2025, even though company revenue grew. The business also reported that AI referrals were already sending more traffic than social media.

WordPress developers can still sell plugins. What has weakened is the old assumption that publishing a useful plugin, ranking in Google and collecting an increasing flow of new buyers will naturally work year after year.

Is AI already hurting WordPress plugin sales?

AI is already putting pressure on simple WordPress plugins, although it is far too early to say that AI is broadly replacing serious WordPress software.

The vulnerable products are easy to recognize. If a plugin exists mainly to add one small behavior to a website, users can increasingly ask ChatGPT, Claude or another coding assistant to generate a snippet instead.

The plugin-company survey conducted after Barn2’s sales slowdown points in the same direction. Products considered easy to replace performed much worse than plugins embedded deeply in customer workflows. Several developers also reported changes in how customers discover and solve WordPress problems through AI.

At the same time, AI does little to remove the need for products such as Wordfence, WooCommerce extensions handling real orders, or complex form systems connected to payments and CRM data.

A generated code snippet may reproduce a tiny visual feature. Asking a business owner to maintain security rules, payment logic or a mission-critical integration through AI-generated PHP is a much bigger leap.

AI is therefore raising the minimum amount of value a paid plugin needs to provide. The smallest utilities are feeling that pressure first.

Do millions of free WordPress plugin installs mean millions in revenue?

No. Active installations are one of the easiest WordPress metrics to misunderstand because enormous free usage can coexist with very little direct revenue.

Contact Form 7 currently has more than 10 million active installations. It is one of the largest WordPress plugins in the world by usage, yet it has never followed the same aggressive premium-subscription model as Elementor or WPForms.

Elementor also sits above 10 million active installations, but the free plugin feeds users into Elementor Pro, hosting, AI and several other paid products.

At a much smaller scale, Barn2 produced $1.71 million of plugin revenue without needing a flagship free product with millions of installations.

That gap tells us why free-install counts are weak evidence on their own.

A more useful question is what happens after somebody installs the plugin. Does the user eventually need payments, automation, security, advanced SEO, more sites, additional integrations or some other premium capability? Will that customer renew next year? Can the company sell another product to the same account?

A smaller plugin with 15,000 committed business customers can sometimes have much better economics than one installed free on a million hobby websites.

Which WordPress plugin categories are making the most convincing money now?

The strongest WordPress plugin businesses today are concentrated around website building, ecommerce, SEO, forms, security and performance.

The evidence keeps pointing toward categories where the plugin controls something expensive or important.

Elementor influences how an entire website is built. WooCommerce plugins can affect merchant revenue. Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO help businesses acquire search traffic. WPForms and Gravity Forms sit between a website and its leads or payments. Wordfence protects live websites. WP Rocket addresses performance on sites where speed can affect conversion and search visibility.

Small utility plugins sit in a tougher position these days. The WordPress plugin survey found that easier-to-replace products were suffering much deeper sales declines, while difficult-to-replace products were far more likely to keep growing.

The practical divide is getting clearer: plugins tied to revenue, customer data, security or a core production workflow have room to charge recurring prices. A plugin that adds one convenience feature has to fight free alternatives, built-in WordPress improvements and AI-generated code at the same time.

Category	Examples	Current commercial case
Website building	Elementor	Massive installed workflow with many paid products around it
Ecommerce	WooCommerce extensions	Merchants can justify spending when plugins affect revenue
SEO	Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO	Large installed bases and repeated acquisition interest
Forms	WPForms, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms	Payments and integrations create stronger retention
Security	Wordfence	High-cost problem supports recurring per-site pricing
Performance	WP Rocket	Hundreds of thousands of reported customers for a premium product
Small utilities	Long tail of plugins	Much more exposed to free substitutes and AI

Are the biggest WordPress plugin companies becoming software portfolios?

Yes. The most successful WordPress plugin companies are increasingly using one plugin to sell several products to the same customer.

Awesome Motive may be the clearest example. Its wider software portfolio runs on more than 30 million websites and includes WPForms, AIOSEO, MonsterInsights, WP Mail SMTP, SeedProd, Smash Balloon and other products.

WPManageNinja is following a similar path around the Fluent brand. Fluent Forms can lead a customer into FluentCRM, FluentSupport, FluentCommunity, FluentAffiliate or FluentCart.

Elementor has pushed even further. A user can now buy the editor, hosting, AI tools, optimization, email services and site-management products from the same company.

Acquisitions tell the same story. Newfold bought Yoast. group.one bought WP Rocket and later Rank Math. Awesome Motive acquired AIOSEO and numerous other WordPress businesses.

These companies are trying to increase the amount each customer can buy without having to win that customer from scratch every time.

That makes the standalone-plugin model less dominant at the top of the market. The bigger prize now is owning the relationship with a WordPress customer and then expanding around that relationship.

Can an independent developer still build a profitable WordPress plugin today?

Yes, but the attractive opportunities today look much narrower and more demanding than “find a WordPress feature people search for and build a plugin.”

Current independent businesses still give us plenty of reasons to take the market seriously.

Studio Wombat grew revenue by 8% despite selling fewer new licenses. Barn2 generated $1.71 million in plugin revenue. Coupon Affiliates’ developer reported that the flagship plugin grew revenue by around 11% in 2025 while the wider business grew roughly 14%.

Those are real businesses rather than hypothetical success stories.

The harder part is customer acquisition. Competition keeps increasing, Google traffic has become less dependable for some plugin companies, and AI can replace more basic functionality than it could a few years ago.

The safer opportunities therefore sit deeper inside a niche. A WooCommerce plugin solving complicated product options, wholesale ordering or another merchant workflow has a stronger position than a plugin whose only promise is adding a small visual feature.

We can also see that small companies do not need gigantic audiences. Thousands of paying customers at roughly $100 per order, followed by good renewal rates, can already produce a seven-figure operation.

For an independent developer, that is probably the most useful benchmark in the entire market.

So which WordPress plugins are making real money now?

WordPress plugins are still making serious money now, with the strongest evidence around Elementor, WP Rocket, major SEO plugins such as Yoast and Rank Math, form products such as WPForms and Gravity Forms, Wordfence, and commercial plugins built around WooCommerce.

We cannot honestly put the private giants into an exact revenue ranking. Their disclosures are not good enough for that.

What we can see clearly is the type of plugin business that keeps working.

Elementor has expanded from a page builder into a broad web-creation platform and now claims more than 22 million websites built. WP Rocket reports roughly 389,000 customers. WPForms reports more than 6 million active installations. Wordfence combines more than 5 million active installs with a $149-per-site annual premium product. WooCommerce currently sits underneath roughly 4.1 million live stores and supports more than 1,500 products in its official marketplace.

Then there is the smaller-company evidence. Barn2 generated $1.71 million in plugin revenue from fewer than 19,000 annual sales, with 61% of revenue coming from renewals. Studio Wombat grew revenue despite selling fewer new licenses.

Taken together, those businesses show where the money has moved.

The best WordPress plugin companies currently own recurring problems rather than isolated features. They get embedded in websites, collect renewals, expand into related products and give customers a reason to keep paying long after the first installation.

That makes the WordPress plugin market harder than it used to be, but far from dead. The easy plugin business is fading. The serious software businesses built inside WordPress are still very real.