All first time Plugin Developers quickly discover that their precious efforts building something amazing was wasted. It doesn’t matter if you’ve built an incredible plugin if nobody downloads it. All that matters at this point is working hard on improving your WordPress Plugin Ranking.
Sure, developing a Plugin for WordPress means you gain access to over 500,000,000 websites as potential customers. The problem remains those customers see the plugin inventory through the tiniest of keyholes. They see 20 plugins per page. And we know people don’t load all that many pages. Most only look at the first page. Being stuck on page 1,800 feels no different than not being listed at all…
So, How do I improve our WordPress Plugin Ranking?
Yes! Three easy items will instantly boost your rankings:
1) Open a support ticket for your plugin, and then resolve it. Plugins with 100% Closed support tickets rank higher than plugins with no tickets at all.
2) Get your users to give you a five star rating on wordpress.org. The average rating for your plugin affects you position in the search results. If you don’t have any ratings yet, then your plugin gets scored at an abysmal 2.5 out of 5.
3) Update your plugin often. Plugins that have not released new versions in the past 3 months receive a penalty and fall down in rankings. Keep it up to date, and make sure it works with the latest version of WordPress.
Yes! Though, this requires more work and a little time. The primary factor in WordPress Plugin Rankings looks like a popularity contest. Your plugin needs active installs! Get to work on that and you’ll see dramatic improvements in your plugin ranking.
Ask your friends to install the plugin. Do the hard work of selling the benefit of you plugin one site administrator at a time. You’ll need at least ten installs to get it going. 50 to 100 and you’ll start to see big week over week improvements.
Yes! This is why we built Pluginalytics in the first place.
Like all software market places, WordPress relies heavily on metadata to evaluate what people like. Once you’ve handled the easy metadata items listed above you are left fighting over the scraps. The keyword fight is critical and it takes significant effort. Doing any sort of keyword research on directly on WordPress.org exceeds most people’s capacity.
The Pluginalytics Tags tool exposes key insights into which keywords are over crowded and which are opportunities. There also you’ll find interesting trends like which plugin tags were most popular in the last week. Updating your keywords to match what people are searching for this week will certainly boost your exposure…