WordPress Plugin Security Trends
What's broken in WordPress.org plugins right now, by the numbers. Aggregate findings from 500 independent audits across the last 6 days of audits.
Most common finding categories
% of audited plugins that ship with at least one finding in each category. Multiple categories can apply to the same plugin.
| Category | Prevalence |
|---|---|
| security | 99.8% |
| WordPress Compatibility | 99.8% |
| Coding Standards | 99.6% |
| Dependencies | 93.8% |
| Type Safety | 90.6% |
| Performance | 73.4% |
| PHP Compatibility | 60.6% |
| Plugin Lifecycle | 59.4% |
| hook-wiring | 57.2% |
| Theme Standards | 56.4% |
| Plugin Conflicts | 54.4% |
| Internationalization | 47.0% |
Grade distribution
Distribution of overall security grades across the sample. Most plugins land between B and D on first audit.
Methodology
Statistics are computed from the last 500 public, completed plugin audits run by WP HealthKit. Each audit runs a multi-engine pipeline including deterministic scanners (Wordfence CVE database, OSV, PHPCS, PHPStan, Semgrep, Psalm, hardcoded-secret detection across 22 patterns) and AI-powered analysis for security, code quality, and accessibility. A 500-audit sample is more than enough for prevalence percentages to stabilise within a percentage point or two.
“Prevalence” measures the percentage of plugins that contain at least one finding in a given category. A single plugin can contribute to multiple category counts but contributes at most once per category, so the percentages don't sum to 100.
Cached at 1-hour granularity. Re-audits are deduplicated by plugin slug (we count each plugin's most recent audit, not historical re-audits).
Want to cite this data? Link to wphealthkit.com/stats/trends. Released under CC-BY 4.0 — attribution requested but not enforced. Email [email protected] if you need raw figures or want to discuss methodology.
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