Stuart Neal
Director of Operations at Nextgen Marketing
We have worked with Vitalli and his team for well over a year now and will continue to do so in the future.
Having the confidence in an agency that allowed us to scale up and down development resources, as and when needed, has really made a positive difference to our agency.
Home / Blog / WordPress / Industry Report – Most popular plugins for WordPress agencies in 2026
Today I got to read the report by WP Umbrella – one of the big players in the WordPress maintenance space. It’s a SaaS that helps agencies automate maintenance for clients. We don’t use it for our clients, but the data is based on 80,000 WordPress sites under maintenance plans in different agencies – the kind of report I always love to read:
Some of the data was more interesting and surprising than I expected
Below you can see the top-10 plugins agencies use most
1. Yoast: 46%2. Elementor: 40% (Pro: 35%)3. Wordfence: 30%4. Advanced Custom Fields PRO: 28%5. Redirection: 25%6. WP Rocket: 24%7. Classic Editor: 23%8. Gravity Forms: 21%9. Rank Math SEO: 20%10. Contact Form 7: 20%
As you see – the most popular plugin is not a page builder, but an SEO plugin. It’s because WordPress is an amazing tool for SEO, and this was a primary reason we built our website with WordPress last year.
WordPress has shipped with Gutenberg by default for 8 years, but agencies (Codelibry included) still prefer the Classic Editor.
Here is how I explain this inside my agency:
So, for the workflow where design comes first, I see why it makes sense to use the classic editor and for the blog – Gutenberg wins easily.
I also still think the FSE experience gives clients too much flexibility, and I don’t really like the ACF Gutenberg experience.
ACF and ACF PRO were and still remain the main choice for agencies. Even though the ACF fork is free, agencies still pay for an agency-wide license and use this plugin for clients.
Honestly, we stick with ACF PRO as well. Maybe to support ACF as the victim in that situation, plus the agency license is quite affordable when you calculate the cost per use on each client website.
When there are 2 solutions, one free and one premium – agencies tend to pick premium
Aurelio Volle, CEO and co-founder of WP Umbrella, says:
“When a client is footing the bill, agencies buy the tool with a support contract.”
For me, this makes sense; however – I still use CF7 in most cases. Maybe we just have good solutions and use cases for it – but I don’t like overbuilt form plugins.
This mini market report shows a couple of interesting things going on in agencies that build with WordPress for their clients. These are not good or bad facts – just something to consider in your development work.
At Codelibry we build white-label WordPress sites for digital agencies – ACF PRO flexible content for pages, Gutenberg for the blog, from your Figma, under your brand. If your team is short on WordPress capacity, here is how the partnership works.
