Many WordPress plugin businesses are struggling for growth right now.

This isn’t news. I’ve heard it and read it enough times over the past months. New sales dipping, renewals doing fine, and markets getting saturated.

I’ve been working with and reviewing WordPress products for over a decade, covering hundreds of plugins and services built by everyone from solo developers working weekends to companies with full engineering teams and significant marketing budgets.

The pattern is almost always the same. The product works, the code is solid, the developer knows their domain inside out, and the plugin does exactly what it promises. But it still isn’t converting the way it should, and it’s rarely because of a bug or a missing feature. More often than not, it comes down to clarity problems that are completely invisible to the people building it.

This article is about how to find those problems yourself, and why that turns out to be harder than it sounds.

Why Plugin Audits Almost Never Happen

Developers audit code constantly. From pull requests to peer reviews and automated tests, there’s a whole culture built around the idea that code needs outside scrutiny before it ships.

The product itself rarely gets that same treatment.

Most plugin developers never sat down and looked at their own product the way a complete stranger would. They’ve never landed on their WordPress.org listing without already knowing what the plugin does, or installed it fresh on a blank site without the context of having built every screen they’re clicking through.

The perspective gap that this creates is real, and it’s where a lot of otherwise solid plugins quietly stall.

Here’s how to start closing that gap.

Start with the 10-Second Test

Open your WordPress.org plugin page or website in an incognito window, pretend you found it through a search, and read the first sentence of your description as if you have no idea what the plugin does.

Is it actually clear to someone who doesn’t already know what problem they’re trying to solve? Can you tell in one sentence what the plugin does, who it’s for, and why that matters?

Most plugin descriptions start with a feature, like “Plugin Name is a powerful tool that lets you do X.” That’s a spec sheet, not a value proposition. The strongest descriptions start with the problem, so the reader recognises themselves in the first line before they’ve read anything else about the product.

I saw this in practice a couple of weeks ago while I was writing the best e-commerce plugins for WordPress piece. When I got to SureCart, their first line caught my attention:

Say goodbye to old, bloated & complex ecommerce plugins that are hard to use, require expensive add-ons for basic features, and slow down your website.
Source: wordpress.org/plugins/surecart

Compare that to WooCommerce’s opening line:

WooCommerce is the open-source ecommerce platform for WordPress. Our core platform is free, flexible, and amplified by a global community.
Source: wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce

At first glance, if WooCommerce wasn’t an already established plugin with Automattic’s backing, which of those two introductory statements sounds most likely to win someone over?

Do you care more about SureCart’s promise of being simpler, cheaper, and faster? Or that WooCommerce is open-source and “amplified by a global community”?

Do an Honest Competitive Comparison

Pull up your three closest competitors and put their WordPress.org pages next to yours.

What are they saying about themselves? What problems are they positioning around, and who are they writing for?

This exercise is uncomfortable, and that’s the point.

Most developers do a competitive check once, probably early on, and then stop paying attention to how the landscape shifts. Messaging that felt genuinely differentiated two years ago can be completely generic today because three new competitors entered the market saying the exact same thing.

You’re looking for two things:

1. Where you’re genuinely different.
2. Whether your listing actually communicates that difference to someone who has never heard of you.

Pressure-Test Your Messaging

Features and outcomes are not the same thing, but most plugin copy is written by people who care deeply about the features, which means most plugin copy talks about features. Buyers buy the outcome the feature produces, not the feature itself.

Go through your plugin page and for every feature claim, ask yourself: so what?

• “Unlimited X”, so what does that actually mean for the person using it?
• “Advanced filtering options,” but what does that let someone do that they couldn’t before?

Keep asking until you get to the thing the user actually cares about, because that’s what your copy should lead with.

Do the same with your meta description in the search results. Read it like a stranger. Does it earn the click, or does it just describe the plugin?

Look at Your Pricing Like a Buyer Would

Pricing mistakes tend to cluster in predictable ways:

• Too many plans with unclear differences.
• Tier names that only make sense internally without making clear what’s actually different between them.
• No anchoring, so there’s nothing to make the middle option feel like obvious value.

There’s a deeper structural problem worth examining too, and most WordPress businesses have it, which is pricing by number of sites.

It’s become the default in this ecosystem, but it creates two problems that are hard to see from the inside.

1. The first is that buyers who only need one site look at your “5 sites” plan and feel like they’re paying for something they don’t want.
2. The second is that site-based pricing makes anchoring almost impossible. Each tier is just a per-site discount, so there’s no qualitative jump between plans. Nothing makes the higher tier feel genuinely more valuable, just “bigger”.

Pricing by features or use case is better since each tier adds something qualitatively different, not just more of the same thing. The buyer self-selects based on what they actually need, and your top plan looks like a step up rather than a bulk deal.

We do this with WP RSS Aggregator. Basic, Pro, and Elite map to real use cases, even if the naming isn’t great. Basic is for simple feed displays, Pro is for automated publishing, Elite is for sites with their content powered almost entirely by the plugin. The feature logic holds up, but we’re not immune to the problems we’re describing here.

Our pricing page asks visitors to make two decisions at once:

1. Which feature tier?
2. How many sites?

That creates a 3×3 grid of nine buying options, which is more cognitive work than it needs to be. Most buyers will instinctively pick a tier first, but the page doesn’t guide them that way. It just presents everything simultaneously and lets them figure it out.

A cleaner approach would be to lead with the feature tier as the primary question, then surface site count as a secondary step, either after they’ve selected a plan or as a toggle that appears once the tier is chosen. Our checkout plugin (EDD) doesn’t make that easy to implement, but presenting one decision at a time would meaningfully reduce the friction a buyer feels on that page.

The real test, whatever your structure is whether someone can land on your pricing page and know within 30 seconds which plan is theirs and why. If there’s any hesitation, you’re losing conversions to that hesitation.

Install Your Own Plugin Fresh

This one consistently surprises people, including us.

Create a clean WordPress install on a local or staging environment and go through your own onboarding as if it’s your first time. Don’t skip steps you know are optional. Don’t dismiss notices you’ve seen a hundred times. Follow the exact path a real new user would follow, with the same patience they’d actually have, which isn’t a lot.

Where do you hesitate? Where does the interface not explain itself? Where do you have to stop and think about what to do next, even for a second?

Every one of those moments is a potential drop-off point for a real user, and most developers skip this exercise entirely because they know the product too well to experience it the way a new user does.

We went through this recently with Spotlight, our Instagram feed plugin. We were fairly happy with the onboarding experience and it was doing well when we launched. It followed most of the standard UX recommendations, covered the key steps, and felt reasonably clean (to us). Then a friend used it for the first time and pointed out something we’d completely missed.

The flow is asking new users to engage with social proof and informational screens before they’d even seen what the plugin could do. For someone using it for the first time, that’s friction they didn’t ask for. They just want to see their photos on their website.

We’re working on trimming those extra steps now, and we wouldn’t have caught it without someone outside the team going through it cold.

Check Your First Impressions Across Every Touchpoint

The plugin page and onboarding are the obvious places to look, but they’re not the only ones.

• Your website if you have one outside WordPress.org.
• Your plugin’s admin UI on first load.
• Your support documentation.
• The email someone receives when they purchase.

Each of these is a first impression for a different type of user, and each one either reinforces your value proposition or quietly undermines it. Pick the three touch points most likely to be a new user’s first contact with your product and go through them cold.

Ask yourself honestly: Is this the impression you want to make?

The Part You’ll Still Miss

Here’s the honest reality of going through all of this yourself.

You’ll find some things. You’ll tighten a headline, rewrite a feature description, clean up a pricing page, and come away with a meaningfully better product. All of that is genuinely useful and I strongly recommend doing it right away.

What you won’t find are the things that are invisible to you precisely because you built this product.

• You won’t notice that your value proposition sounds like three other plugins because you wrote it before those plugins existed.
• You won’t feel the hesitation a first-time buyer has on your pricing page, because you’ve never been a confused buyer of your own product.
• You won’t spot that your onboarding assumes knowledge your users don’t have yet, because that knowledge is so second nature to you that you’ve stopped seeing it as something that needs explaining.

The Spotlight example above is a good illustration of this. We thought we’d done everything right, and in a lot of ways, we had. We just couldn’t see the friction because we’d built every screen we were looking at. It took someone with no history of the product to point at the obvious thing we’d been walking past for months.

This isn’t a failure or a reflection of how carefully you’ve built something. It’s just proximity, and it’s true of every product built by anyone at any level of experience.

Outside perspective is often where the most valuable feedback comes from, and for a lot of products, it’s the most important part of the process.

If You’d Rather Have Someone Do This for You

The self-audit above is worth doing regardless of what you decide next. Go through each section seriously, take notes, and pay particular attention to the things that feel most uncomfortable to look at.

That discomfort is usually pointing at something real. Most developers who do this come away with a cleaner listing and sharper positioning. Some come away realising the issues run deeper than what they can see clearly on their own, which is a useful thing to know before spending more on marketing.

If you want to go beyond the self-audit, I do this kind of review professionally. The Product Audit is a focused, $500 review covering competitive positioning, messaging, pricing, onboarding, and first impressions, delivered as a video walkthrough and written summary with specific things to act on.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade making a lot of these mistakes myself, I know how buyers think, and I’ve seen enough products to recognise quickly where the real problems tend to hide.

Have you ever had someone outside your team go through your plugin fresh and point out something you’d completely missed?