How we rank

What goes into the score

Five components, weighted as follows:

• User rating — 35%. The published star rating, adjusted for sample size. A 5.0 from three people is not stronger evidence than a 4.7 from nine hundred, so small samples are pulled toward the directory average until enough ratings accumulate to move them.
• Adoption — 25%. Active installs for WordPress.org products, sales for marketplace products. Scaled logarithmically: the gap between 100 and 10,000 users matters far more than the gap between 900,000 and a million.
• Maintenance — 22%. How recently the product shipped an update. Something last touched three years ago is a liability regardless of how good it once was.
• Compatibility — 10%. How current the "tested up to" WordPress version is.
• Support — 8%. The share of support threads marked resolved, where there are enough threads to mean anything.

Why some products have no score

A large part of the premium market publishes no rating and no install count. When we have nothing real to measure, we say so: those products appear in a clearly separated block below the ranked list, marked unscored. We would rather show you an honest gap than a number we invented to fill it.

Where the data comes from

• The public WordPress.org plugin and theme directory APIs — ratings, active installs, update dates, tested-up-to versions, support thread counts.
• The Envato marketplace API for premium items — sales, ratings, prices and current version.
• Product descriptions and feature lists as published by the vendor.

Figures are refreshed on a schedule. A product page always shows what we last read, and you should confirm anything decision-critical on the vendor's own page before you buy.

How the tagging works

Every product is matched against a vocabulary of purposes, industries, platforms, features, audiences and strengths, using its name, its own tags and its description. Matches carry a relevance weight, and a product only appears in a list when its match is strong enough to be meaningful — which is why a general page-builder add-on does not turn up under "hospital themes".

What money does and does not change

Some outbound links earn a commission. That funds the site. It does not affect the score, the order of any list, or whether a product is included — the ranking is computed from the data before any commercial consideration is applied, and free products with no affiliate programme at all regularly top these lists.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a mis-tagged product, a stale figure, a listing attributed to the wrong author — tell us and we will fix it.