WordPress Plugin Directory Scraper

What does WordPress Plugin Directory Scraper do?

It extracts the WordPress.org plugin directory — roughly 65,000 plugins — as a clean, structured dataset, and adds the maintenance and opportunity signals the official API doesn't give you: how long since the last release, whether the plugin is stale, how much of its support queue actually gets resolved, and a single opportunity_score that ranks popular but neglected plugins.

Run it with no configuration at all and you get the 100 most-installed plugins with every derived signal attached. Change one number and you get the whole directory.

Because it runs on Apify you get scheduled runs, a REST API, webhooks, and export to JSON, CSV, Excel or HTML without writing any glue code.

Why use WordPress Plugin Directory Scraper?

• Find a gap before you build. Sort by opportunity_score to surface plugins with a large install base, a mediocre rating, no release in years and an unanswered support forum. That is a market, not a data dump.
• Competitive research. Pull every plugin for a tag or an author and compare install counts, ratings, versions and WordPress compatibility side by side.
• Track abandonment. days_since_update and is_stale turn "is this plugin still maintained?" into a filterable column across the whole directory.
• Security and compatibility inventories. version, tested, requires and requires_php for every plugin, refreshed on a schedule.
• Lead lists for agencies. Authors of large, ageing plugins are people who may need help.

How to use WordPress Plugin Directory Scraper

1. Click Try for free / Start.
2. Leave everything on its default to get the 100 most popular plugins, or pick a Mode — search a keyword, filter by tag or author, or name exact plugin slugs.
3. Set Max results. 100 is the default; the whole directory is about 65,000.
4. Optionally set Minimum active installs to ignore the long tail of tiny plugins.
5. Click Save & Start, then open the Output tab or download the dataset as JSON, CSV, HTML or Excel.

To keep a dataset current, schedule the Actor daily or weekly — the directory changes constantly.

Input

Configure it on the Input tab, or via the API:

Field	Type	Default	Notes
mode	enum	browse	browse, search, tag, author, or slugs
browseType	enum	popular	Used with browse: popular, new, beta, recommended
searchQuery	string	—	Required for mode: search
tag	string	—	Required for mode: tag, e.g. woocommerce
author	string	—	Required for mode: author, e.g. automattic
slugs	string[]	—	Required for mode: slugs, e.g. ["akismet"]
maxResults	integer	100	Hard cap on records pushed
minActiveInstalls	integer	0	Skip plugins below this install count
includeFullDescription	boolean	false	Adds the full HTML description; ~9× larger records

A missing required field fails the run immediately with a clear message rather than quietly falling back to a different mode.

{
  "mode": "browse",
  "browseType": "popular",
  "maxResults": 5000,
  "minActiveInstalls": 10000
}

Output

One record per plugin. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

{
  "slug": "health-check",
  "name": "Health Check & Troubleshooting",
  "version": "1.7.1",
  "author_name": "WordPress.org",
  "author_profile_url": "https://profiles.wordpress.org/wordpressdotorg/",
  "requires": "4.4",
  "tested": "6.6.5",
  "requires_php": "5.6",
  "rating": 72,
  "rating_out_of_5": 3.6,
  "num_ratings": 181,
  "support_threads": 6,
  "support_threads_resolved": 0,
  "support_resolution_rate": 0.0,
  "active_installs": 300000,
  "downloaded": 5336798,
  "last_updated": "2024-07-25 9:43pm GMT",
  "days_since_update": 742,
  "is_stale": true,
  "opportunity_score": 77.98,
  "opportunity_popularity": 0.7824,
  "opportunity_rating_gap": 0.28,
  "opportunity_staleness": 1.0,
  "opportunity_support_gap": 1.0,
  "tags_list": ["health check"],
  "short_description": "Health Check identifies common problems, and helps you troubleshoot plugin and theme conflicts.",
  "homepage": "https://wordpress.org/plugins/health-check/",
  "download_link": "https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/health-check.1.7.1.zip",
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-06T05:10:52.867062+00:00"
}

Data fields

Field	Meaning
slug	Plugin slug, as in the wordpress.org/plugins/<slug>/ URL
name	Display name, HTML entities decoded
version	Latest released version
author_name, author_profile_url	Author name and WordPress.org profile
requires, tested, requires_php, requires_plugins	Compatibility requirements
rating, rating_out_of_5, num_ratings, ratings	Rating as a 0–100 percentage, converted to stars, plus the star histogram
support_threads, support_threads_resolved, support_resolution_rate	Support forum volume and resolved share (null when there are no threads)
active_installs	Active installs — a bucketed approximation, see caveats
downloaded	All-time download count
last_updated, added, days_since_update, is_stale	Release recency; is_stale is true past 365 days
opportunity_score + four components	See below
tags_list	Plugin tags as an array
short_description, description	Summary always; full HTML body only with includeFullDescription
homepage, download_link, donate_link, icons	Links and assets
scraped_at	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp of the run

How the opportunity score works

opportunity_score is 0–100, higher meaning "more attractive to compete with". Four components, each normalised to 0–1, are combined with fixed weights:

Component	Definition	Weight
opportunity_popularity	log10(active_installs) scaled against the 10,000,000 top bucket — log, because install counts are bucketed powers of ten	0.35
opportunity_staleness	days_since_update over a 730-day ceiling, capped at 1	0.30
opportunity_rating_gap	1 - rating/100; a neutral 0.5 below 5 ratings, where the average is noise	0.20
opportunity_support_gap	1 - support_resolution_rate; a neutral 0.5 when there are no threads	0.15

All four components are emitted on every record, so if you disagree with the weighting you can recompute the score yourself without re-running anything. Popularity and staleness carry most of the weight because the thing worth finding is a plugin lots of people rely on that nobody is looking after.

Caveats worth reading

• active_installs is bucketed by WordPress.org, not exact. It reports 10, 100, 1000, 10000, ... — a value of 1000000 means "1 million or more". Treat it as an order of magnitude, never a precise count. This is a limitation of the source data, not of this Actor.
• rating is a 0–100 percentage in the source API. rating_out_of_5 is the star equivalent.
• The directory total drifts while you page through it. Plugins are added and removed live, so consecutive requests report slightly different totals. Records are de-duplicated by slug, so a long run never emits the same plugin twice — but the exact set of plugins you get for a large maxResults will differ slightly run to run.
• support_resolution_rate is null, not 0, when a plugin has no support threads. No threads means no signal, not perfect support.
• Ratings and install counts are self-reported by WordPress.org and reflect what the directory publishes, nothing more.

Cost

The Actor is pay-per-result: you're charged per plugin record pushed to the dataset, with no charge for pages that produce nothing. A 1,000-plugin run is a fixed, predictable cost, and the Apify free tier is enough to try the default 100-plugin run. Current pricing is shown on the Actor's Store page.

To keep costs down: set maxResults to what you actually need, use minActiveInstalls to skip the long tail, and leave includeFullDescription off unless you need the HTML body — it makes records roughly 9× larger for no extra signal.

Tips

• Looking for a gap? mode: browse, browseType: popular, minActiveInstalls: 10000, maxResults: 5000, then sort the dataset by opportunity_score descending.
• Auditing one niche? mode: tag with the tag slug from any plugin page's sidebar.
• Monitoring competitors? mode: slugs with the handful you care about, on a daily schedule, and watch version and days_since_update.
• browse: beta and browse: recommended are short curated lists — a run will legitimately return only a handful of records.

FAQ

Is scraping the WordPress.org plugin directory legal? This Actor uses the official, public, unauthenticated WordPress.org plugins API — no HTML scraping, no login, no circumvention. The data is published by WordPress.org for exactly this purpose. It contains no personal data beyond the public author names and profile URLs the directory itself displays. You are responsible for how you use the output.

Why did I get fewer results than maxResults? The query ran out of matches. beta and recommended are small lists, and searches or tags with few plugins finish early. The run log says so explicitly.

One of my slugs came back missing. Slugs that don't exist on WordPress.org are logged as a warning and skipped; the rest of the run continues.

Can I get plugin download statistics over time, or theme data? Not from this Actor. Open an issue on the Issues tab if you need it.

Support

Found a bug or need a field that isn't here? Open an issue on the Issues tab of this Actor — that's the fastest route. Custom variants of this Actor can be built on request.