WordPress plugin ownership changes, week by week

Every Sunday we ask WordPress.org for the 5,000 most popular plugins, with each one’s owner and listed contributors, and compare the answer with the week before. Below: the plugins with a new owner, the ones where every listed contributor was replaced, and the ones that were closed. For each, the commits made since, taken from the plugin’s public log, with the accounts that were not listed before marked.

A new owner is often an honest sale. It is also how most WordPress plugin backdoors of the last two years began: 31 plugins bought and backdoored in 2026 is the clearest case. So a change of hands is a reason to read the next update before you install it, not a reason to panic.

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The first report

The watch started on 1 November 2026 with 4,985 plugins. The first weekly comparison is published here on 8 November 2026.

How this is worked out

The owner is the WordPress.org account the directory shows as the plugin’s author; the contributors are the accounts its listing names. Both come from the directory’s public API. Commits come from each plugin’s public SVN log on plugins.svn.wordpress.org. A contributor list can change for ordinary reasons, a new team member or a tidy-up, which is why those changes are listed separately and kept short. Plugins outside the 5,000 most popular are not covered here.

On your own site

This page covers popular plugins. OwnerTrail, free on WordPress.org, watches the plugins you actually run, whatever their size: it warns the day one changes hands or gains a new committer, and holds its next update until you have looked.