If you have been watching the repo lately, you know the pace has picked up. The WordPress Plugins Team just published its latest stats: 150 submissions a week in 2024, over 500 a week in 2026. Growth like that turns into a bottleneck quickly unless the human infrastructure behind it scales too.
I have watched this happen before with major API updates. Everyone rushes to build the “next big thing” and the gatekeepers end up buried. So the team is asking for a fresh wave of contributors to help hold the quality and security of the ecosystem together. If you care about the code a large part of the web runs on, they could use you.
The 500-plugin problem
In 2025 the team doubled the number of plugins it handled with the same small group of volunteers. By March 2026 the pace has quadrupled. Two days now brings in as many plugins as a full week used to. That is a security and stability problem for every site owner installing from the directory, not only a counting problem.
As I said when I wrote about why the team name change matters, these volunteers are the first line of defense against malformed code and security holes. A backed-up queue means frustrated developers, and then “hacks” start showing up in the wild because people will not wait for the official review.
What a plugin reviewer actually does
Joining the WordPress Plugins Team is not a matter of clicking “Approve”. You read thousands of lines of other people’s logic looking for improper data sanitization, missing nonces, race conditions in transients. Here is the kind of snippet a reviewer catches before it puts a site at risk:
<?php
/**
* THE WRONG WAY: Direct input in a query.
* Reviewers catch this every single day.
*/
function bbioon_save_settings_bad() {
if ( isset( $_POST['plugin_option'] ) ) {
update_option( 'my_plugin_data', $_POST['plugin_option'] ); // NO SANITIZATION!
}
}
/**
* THE RIGHT WAY: Sanitized and validated.
*/
function bbioon_save_settings_good() {
// 1. Check permissions
if ( ! current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) return;
// 2. Verify nonce
check_admin_referer( 'bbioon_settings_action', 'bbioon_nonce' );
if ( isset( $_POST['plugin_option'] ) ) {
// 3. Sanitize the input based on expected type
$clean_data = sanitize_text_field( $_POST['plugin_option'] );
update_option( 'my_plugin_data', $clean_data );
}
}
Reviewers work from the Detailed Plugin Guidelines and check every submission against the community standards. Training runs two months, and after that you are one of the people holding the directory together.
Who pays for the reviews
The organizations paying for this deserve a mention. Awesome Motive, SiteGround and Hostinger are already sponsoring thousands of reviews. If your company makes its money on WordPress, sponsoring a volunteer is about the most direct way to keep the platform a trustworthy source of functionality.
Without those sponsors the WordPress Plugins Team would fold under 500+ weekly tickets. If 10 hours a week of code review is not realistic for you, ask whether your company can cover someone else’s hours through Five for the Future.
If plugin work is eating your dev hours, hand it to me. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
The 2026 timeline
Applications for the first round close on 27 March 2026, and there is a second window in June if you miss it. The directory keeps growing, and it needs technical people to stop it turning into the Wild West. The Featured Plugins Experiment shows where the directory is heading, and if you have the skills, sign up.
