Thirteen Days as a WordPress.org Featured Plugin

*Updated 5 September 2026 with the full thirteen-day results.*

From 22 August to 3 September 2026, Queryra was one of eight plugins in the Featured tab on WordPress.org, listed there as AI Search for WooCommerce – Semantic Search. The tab turns over roughly every two weeks. My run in it lasted thirteen days, and Queryra left on 4 September.

That's the tab that opens by default when you click Plugins → Add New inside any WordPress site. You can open the Featured listing on WordPress.org to see which eight are in it now.

When this went up on day one I promised to publish what those thirteen days did to my numbers, including if the answer turned out to be "not much". That is the second half of this page.

WordPress.org rotates eight lesser-known plugins into that tab every two weeks. The selection is made by a person at WordPress.org against published criteria: code quality and WordPress coding standards, proper escaping and sanitization, readme accuracy, whether the plugin solves something the ecosystem isn't already served well on, and how responsive the developer is in the support forums.

There is no application form and no fee. It is not something you can buy. Every eligible plugin sits in the pool automatically and eight get picked.

That last part is the bit that matters to me. Queryra is a one-person project. Somebody at WordPress.org read the code, looked at how I answer support threads, and decided it was worth putting in front of people. That is a different kind of signal from anything I could have paid for or asked for.

The programme has been running since March. Dozens of plugins have been through it by now.

I went looking for a first-hand account from any of them, an author writing up what being featured did to their numbers, and I couldn't find a single one. The curator published figures for the very first cohort back in March and said more would follow. There hasn't been a second report. When somebody asked publicly for a list of previously featured plugins, the question sat there unanswered.

So there is no first-hand account of what this does, written by someone it happened to.

I was in the cohort from day one. I recorded my baseline before the rotation started and logged the numbers every day: downloads, active installs, support threads, signups, and how many of those people ever ran a search.

Here is what I logged.

The public numbers first, because you can check every one of them yourself on the plugin page.

Downloads rose by about 1,300 over the thirteen days, to roughly 4,100 by the time the rotation ended.

*Two notes on those figures. Active installations is the number printed on the plugin page. WordPress.org reports it in buckets, and the copy of it in their API runs a day or more behind the page, so the two disagree on most days and I am quoting the page. The download figure is "about" because two consecutive daily readings came back identical, which means one of them was stale, and I would rather bracket a number than invent precision for it.*

Installs are the number everybody publishes. What those people do next is the number nobody publishes, and that is the one I was actually recording. These are my own numbers rather than WordPress.org's: an activation is the plugin reporting in from a site, which is a different thing from the bucketed install count above, and the two counters will never line up. Both columns below cover thirteen days: the thirteen before the rotation, and the thirteen in it.

*The wizard, account and first-search rows are percentages of activations: 26 before, 565 during.*

The tab sent me twenty-two times more people and one tenth of the engagement. That isn't a complaint, it's the answer: Featured is discovery, not intent.

Of the accounts opened in those thirteen days, 100 of 132 verified their email. In the thirteen before, 13 of 17. That is the figure I would check first: if the accounts had been opened by scripts, verification is what would have collapsed. It didn't. The accounts that were opened were opened by people.

That is all it can carry, so I will not stretch it further. It says nothing about everyone who installed the plugin and never opened an account, and they are the large majority.

They simply arrived for a different reason. Before the tab, somebody installing Queryra had gone looking for search, and half of them ran one. During it, they were scanning a list of eight plugins on the screen WordPress opens by default, and 4.8% ran one. Same plugin, same wizard, different intent.

The same eight plugins stayed in the tab for all thirteen days. What changed was the order, which was different every time I looked.

I don't know what decides that order, and I don't know whether every visitor sees the same one. So read what follows as thirteen days of one plugin's numbers sorted by where it happened to appear. It is not an experiment and I am not going to dress it up as one.

The top band averaged roughly three times the bottom one.

The widest single pair I recorded is two Sundays. On Sunday 23 August I was first in the list: 91 activations. On Sunday 30 August I was fourth: 11. That pair is roughly eight to one, while the bands above are closer to three to one. It shows how far two single days can spread, not the size of the effect.

*Thirteen days is a small sample and the top band rests on two of them. One of those two is that same 23 August, the second day of the rotation, so position and novelty sit tangled together in exactly the band carrying the most weight. This is an observation, not a result, and I would not build anything on it. I am publishing it because it is the number I wanted to read before my own rotation started, and nobody has published it at all.*

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The eight of us stayed together for the whole rotation. Only the running order changed, redrawn daily, which is what made the position figures above worth writing down.

None of them does anything close to what Queryra does, and all of them are worth two minutes of your time. That is rather the point of the tab.

Queryra is AI search for WordPress and WooCommerce. It matches on meaning rather than keywords, so a visitor who types "gift for someone who likes cooking" finds the right things even when none of those words appear in a product title. It works the same way on articles, documentation and course content as it does on products.

There's a live demo at woo.queryra.com. No signup and no email address, just type something into it and see what comes back.

Active installations move slowly and in jumps, and the figure is still settling now that the rotation has moved on. I'll add the settled install number to this page in two to four weeks, the same way I added the rest of this.