[00:00:00 ] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My Is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes and in this case, the effectiveness of the wordpress.org repository for promoting new plugins.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to WPTavern.com forward slash feed forward slash podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea featured on the show. Do that by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash contact forward slash jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, we have Matt Cromwell. Matt is Senior Director of Operations and Marketing at StellarWP, where he provides marketing and business insights and coaching to burgeoning WordPress product owners. He’s also one of the founders of GiveWP, a donation plugin, which uses the freemium model. Having a free version on wordpress.org’s repository as well as a paid premium offering.

The wordpress.org repository is where you find yourself when you click the add new button in the WP admin. It’s a place where plugin developers can, if they follow the guidelines, hosts to their plugins. It provides a direct line of access to all WordPress websites, and is therefore a convenient, free place to host your plugin.

In return, the plugins in the repository must be freely available by the plugin authors. In the past few weeks, the repository has been in the news. Some statistics were unexpectedly removed, and this has led to a conversation about the governance of the repository, as well as questions about whether or not the repository is still a worthwhile place to offer your free plugins, if you have a premium tier.

Alex Denning wrote a post entitled, “WordPress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022”, in which he lays out his thoughts as to why he no longer recommends the WordPress repository. The battle against already successful plugins, low conversion rates, and the difficulty in gaining visibility are amongst the arguments that he puts forward.

Shortly after Alex’s post was published, Matt Cromwell posted a rebuttal entitled, “The case for the WordPress freemium model”. And this is the basis of the podcast today.

We talk about Matt’s history in WordPress as a premium plugin owner and how his experience leads him to conclude differently. That the WordPress repository can be successful, given the right expectations and approach. He’s found using the repository to be an effective channel to drive the plugins premium tier, as well as a way of offering a useful free donation tool to the community.

It’s a fascinating chat and is sure to be of interest to anyone thinking about starting a freemium plugin.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading over to WPTavern.com forward slash podcast. Where you’ll find all of the other episodes as well. And so, without further delay, I bring you Matt Cromwell.

I am joined on the podcast today by Matt Cromwell. Hello, Matt.

[00:04:19 ] Matt Cromwell: Hi, thanks for having me.

[00:04:20 ] Nathan Wrigley: You’re very welcome. We’ve got a, an interesting subject today, all about the wordpress.org ecosystem and whether or not it would be sensible or otherwise to put your free plugin over there. Before we get stuck into that debate, though properly, anybody that is unfamiliar with Matt, let’s give him an opportunity to introduce himself. So, Matt, just give us a few moments of your time to tell us who you are, what your relationship is with WordPress, what you’ve done in the past in the WordPress space.

[00:04:47 ] Matt Cromwell: Sure. I’ve been in WordPress for a while. I would say about 2012 or so. Jumped in and started building websites with WordPress, mostly helping non-profit organizations, churches, educational institutions. Then ended up partnering up with my longtime business partner, Devin Walker, and he and I decided to tackle a big problem in WordPress, which at that time was how to take online donations.

And so we created a plugin called GiveWP, and that was launched in 2015. That has catapulted us into our career, and has done really well and we’re really proud of it. So much so that we sold it last year to uh, Liquid Web, which is where we are now in the StellarWP brands. There, we have also just recently been asked to uh, take on a bit more. And so now Devin and I are both managing GiveWP as well as iThemes, Iconic and Kadence WP. So things keep getting more and more exciting.

[00:05:44 ] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. Yeah, really broad and rich history there. We could have spent the podcast talking about those products, but we’re not going to. Well, I think we might do tangentially as a way of demonstrating different things. But we’re on the podcast today to talk about a couple of pieces which came out.

I will link correctly to both of the pieces that we’re in discussions about today. But I’ll mention them both in turn so that those listening to the podcast could possibly have a quick read of them before they pursue any further. So the first one was produced on the 18th of October by Alex Denning over at getellipsis.com, and that piece was called wordpress.org is ineffective for plugin distribution in 2022.

And then a few days after that, you, Matt Cromwell, wrote a piece and that was at mattcromwell.com and it was called the case for the WordPress plugin freemium model. And in effect, your piece coming a little bit later was a rebuttal about what Alex was saying. Now, if you’d like to outline what Alex is saying, you are welcome to do that. Alternatively, I could try and outline what Alex was saying, which would you prefer?

[00:06:54 ] Matt Cromwell: I think you are much more fair than I.

[00:06:56 ] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that’s very kind of you. The long and the short of Alex’s piece is that he believes that by the year 2022, we’ve got to a point where, if you are going to be releasing a plugin, a free plugin, into the WordPress space, he believes that it’s now no longer effective to do that on wordpress.org. The article is probably about a 10 or 15 minute read, and as always with Alex’s pieces, there’s lots and lots of data and so on to back it up. But essentially he believes it’s ineffective for a variety of reasons.

One of them is that the marketplace seems to be dominated, in his view, by some giant incumbents. We’ve all seen those plugins before. If you’ve tried to add a new plugin through the WordPress repository, you’ll probably know the plugins that we’re talking about. They always rise to the top. And that’s largely because, Alex thinks, because of the install base that they’ve already got. Once they’ve got over a certain amount, the hump of a 100,000, 500,000 or 1,000,000 installs, then it becomes more likely that they’re going to be surfaced.

There’s also the idea that, in the recent past, especially since 2016, he makes the point, it’s much more difficult for new plugins to breach that number. So getting past a hundred thousand and so on is more difficult, which is compounding the problem.

And then if you add on to that, the fact that the search functionality within the WordPress repository also doesn’t give the opportunity for new plugins to be discovered. If you go there and you search for particular keywords, his contention would be that it’s much more likely that the ones with the greater install base are going to be surfaced first. In other words, it’s a bit of a, an echo chamber, I suppose, in a sense is what he’s saying.

Given all of that, he contends that you would be better off spending your time, and I guess for time you could read money as well, elsewhere. It might be better to have social campaigns or Google ads or some other channel of distribution, outside of wordpress.org, and so your endeavors would be better served elsewhere.

Alex I hope that I’ve summed that up correctly. If I’ve not, pleased do get in touch and let me know where I’ve mistaken things and I will gladly amend the show notes as such. But that, broadly speaking, is Alex’s contention. And, a day or so later compelled you to write a rebuttal. Just tell us what your thoughts are.

[00:09:26 ] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Generally speaking I gave some good caveats in my piece that Alex does know what he’s talking about, and he has a lot of data to back up his conclusions, and I still believe that strongly um, he has reasons for saying what he says. What compelled me to write a rebuttal were essentially a couple claims that I felt were potentially not as helpful for the WordPress ecosystem.

In particular, one thing I think that’s important of what he’s saying is that, he says essentially that if you’re serious about your business and you want to build plugins then you should do premium only, and not a freemium model. Like basically do not build a free plugin, build a premium only plugin. And I really do believe that is damaging to the WordPress ecosystem overall.

If we start to see an influx of premium only offerings it can be really harder for the common user because, we all know it doesn’t take one plugin to build your website. It often takes a dozen, or several dozen plugins to build your website. And if you have to go, and be purchasing them a