Here’s an interesting question: what’s the average percentage of users who leave a review for a WordPress plugin?
Before you say a number, let me provide you with a little context here:
As of today, there are more than 54K plugins listed in the WordPress repository and:
- All of them are free to use
- All plugins provide some functionality, no matter whether you deem it useful or not. In fact, any plugin developer has to provide minimal working functionality to their plugin when submitting it to have it listed
- WordPress powers up to 33% of the entire internet
Which means:
- Thousands of plugins free to use means low entry barriers in term of attracting new users
- Minimum functionality guaranteed means all plugin do something, hence there’s likely a small group of WordPress users out there who are looking for that functionality. Having it for free is a strong driver
- 33% of the Internet means lots of people are using plugins and constantly search for them
So, having said that:
What do you think it’s the average percentage of users who leave a review on the WordPress repository?
Think of a number (but don’t get too attached to it).
I’ll tell you what it is in a second.
I’ve been doing some research lately and started to pay attention to something I barely looked at in the past: plugin reviews.
The more I kept researching and browsing through plugin pages, the most frequently I saw a totally unexpected trend related to reviews.
So I dug deeper to understand whether what I was seeing was just something coincidental or had deeper roots.
How many reviews does a WordPress plugin receive on average?
Given how many plugins there are on the WordPress repo (see the number above), I picked the most adopted and used ones, which are grouped under the “Popular” research.
Then, I started investigating all the data in there for my review-to-install ratio quest. What would this ratio be? The more I dug, the clearer it became: it’s low.
But how low, you ask?
So here it is: I put together all the data for the most popular WordPress plugins in the WordPress repo and calculated the review-to-install ratio for all of them.
What’s the average percentage of users who leave a review for a WordPress plugin?
The average is 0.20%.
Boom! It’s out there.
If I were a plugin developer, I’d be probably faint for a second or nodding frantically because you now have quantifiable research to back up how hard it is to get reviews with your clients.
Ok ok, it’s not the worst thing it could have happened to your plugin (I’d say top 3, though).
But, man, this data just suckerpunched your plugin’s ability to attract more users and leverage the WordPress repo as a solid acquisition channel.
Why that (in short)?
The more engaged your users are and the more your marketing encourages them to leave a review, the more reviews you’ll receive. Social proof is a crucial element on top of which most plugin developers rely on to attract new users and increase their number of downloads.
So, if the average review-to-install ratio is 0.20% for a single plugin, it means that 99.80% of active WordPress users on average download a plugin — your plugin maybe —, are currently using it, yet they likely won’t share a review for it.
Wanna know how the best plugin is doing on the review-to-install ratio among the popular WordPress plugins?
It’s a little more than 3%.
Now, the number of installs sure impacts how high or low this metric can be. We can anticipate that with plugins used by fewer users against plugins with millions of users, the reviews ratio could likely change more easily because a single review weights more on the total number of reviews and the silent user base.
But that’s the whole thing: the silent user base should be your target.
Review-to-install ratio grouped by number of active installs
You can see all the data in my spreadsheet here divided by Key Findings and All data.
Here below I featured my key findings so you don’t need to go through all data on your own.
From 30k+ to 90k+ active installs
Review-to-install ratio: 0.22% on average.
From 100K+ to 500k+ active installs
Review-to-install ratio: 0.19% on average.
From 600k+ to 1Mil+ active installs
Review-to-install ratio: 0.14% on average.
From 2Mil+ to 5Mil+ active installs
Review-to-install ratio: 0.14% on average.
Best of all “Popular” plugins
Wrapping up
I’ll come clean: I was shocked and still am a bit if you ask me. I knew just a small portion of WordPress users will spend a little time for sharing a review and many are those who want to just vent their frustration out no matter if the plugin actually has a bug.
But seeing that only 0.2% of users on average will share their review about a plugin is a lower percentage I couldn’t honestly anticipate.
What I imagined the biggest challenge for a WordPress plugin to be, i.e. getting more downloads, is just part of a greater and more ferocious challenge: getting more reviews — hopefully, 5- and 4-star reviews — as their most effective and scalable way to attract new users consistently through the repo, hence increasing the number of downloads.
The review-to-install ratio has always been there, we just haven’t paid attention to it. It’s like the side of the moon we never see: it’s there, even though we don’t talk about it.
Are you looking for help getting more reviews for your plugin?
I’m available to help your plugin grow with more reviews, leads, and happy users. To start things off, tell me more about your WordPress plugin over here.
One thing that accounts for larger active install counts getting lower ratio of reviews is repeat use. That is to say many of those plugins that have 1M+ installs don’t have 1M+ users, probably more like 250k Users with avg 4 sites each using that plugin. So any calculations based on the “Active Install” count as a count of users would not be accurate at large scale.
Good table of data to play with though.
Hey Daniel, thanks for your feedback. Actually, I’m researching the topic you’ve brought up to attention more deeply and I found a comment from Otto (Plugin Review Team) saying this:
I need to dig deeper in this because it’s not as clear as it should be.
Thanks for sharing your useful insight!
I really appreciated this post. I’d love a follow-up post on plugin developers who’ve tried various strategies – what works, what doesn’t. We just recently had some success with reviews in the directory with a few simple changes in how we asked our users.
Thank you Stephanie! Yes, I’m working on a follow-up post that will collect data and insights from plugin developers. Be sure to check my site soon :)
Our plugin, The SEO Framework has now nearly 90 000 and only 186 reviews. That means that roughly only 1 in 500 users leave the review. However, I honestly don’t think it the most critical growth factor. Reviews on popular WP blogs are much more critical and word of mouth works wonderfully for well-made plugins.
The amount of 5-star reviews is mostly useful for damage control — Our main competitor, Yoast, is the best example. After they botched an update and users plastered w.org with 1-star reviews they had to start asking users to review their plugin to get their credibility back. I understand why they did it and I would probably do the same, but at the same time, this opens Pandora’s box. Users suddenly know you care about reviews and use it as a leverage to get support or refunds and such. Yoast is an edge case and now they have so many 5-star reviews that even major oopsie won’t hurt them.
We tried to use all of their shortcomings to our advantage. TSF adds no upsell in the WordPress dashboard, no begging for reviews or even branding. These differences set us apart and facilitated the growth of installs, but our bottom line is getting screwed from the get-go because people don’t even know there is a premium version. It is the other extreme approach and we are currently trying to solve the seemingly impossible — how to ask users for review without actually asking.
So far we figured that the only sensible way to ask for reviews is to do so after solving a support request on w.org. I asked 5 people, 2 left reviews. While this is not representative data, it is certainly one of the best ways to get a review. The user already has w.org account and we have his attention without annoying/spamming/nagging. Obviously, this has it’s own shortcomings, mainly because the user probably made an account on w.org because of some problem they were having. Plus if your plugin is reliable, you don’t get a huge amount of support queries.
So what is our current approach for getting more reviews? Pretty much just maintaining the plugin quality and rely more on the number of installs. If you come up with something better, please do let me know! :)
(Seriously, let us know)
(Also, if you want more info for your followup post, we gladly try to answer your questions)
Hey LeBaux,
thanks for sharing your take on this topic and for highlighting what’s your approach towards asking for reviews.
My point being reviews are ONE of the aspects to always keep an eye on as a plugin developer because they provide that social proof “element” we all look for before downloading/buying a product.
Having said that, as you also pointed out, getting your plugin mentioned on website and blogs helps as well but in a different way: traffic spike, SEO juice, social sharing on a 3rd-party site. But also in this example: what if the traffic you’re getting doesn’t convert, because it’s not the right type of audience or they’re not ready yet? That’s just an example to surface that also having a blog mentioning your plugin isn’t always the best case.
It’s oftentimes a matter of compound efforts.
Reviews alone, just as installs, can’t be your North Start metric. That’d be a shortsighted approach. Yet, reviews, or even better, the way you build an ongoing flow of 5-star reviews sure plays an important role in your acquisition strategy.