In reply to Chris Hughes.

Hi Chris,

Your statistics and graphs suggest you are comparing apples to apples but you're actually comparing apples to oranges.

What I really want to know is how many active (running a publicly accessible site) installs of Wordpress using the Classic editor plugin and how many active installs of Wordpress are running with stock Gutenberg block editor. This information is necessary to make business decisions on.

Your graphs show that the number of downloads for the classic editor is decreasing but it doesn't show total installs for one editor vs the other.

I don't think Gutenberg can be classed as a success until significantly more than half of all active installs are using it. The information in your graphs doesn't prove or disprove this.

Even if 60% of sites were using it doesn't really mean you can drop support for the other 40% of sites. I would say until Gutenberg has 95% adoption then you can drop support for the other 5% of users.

It would be good to keep track of the active installs for each editor on a monthly basis to see when Gutenberg became/becomes the preferred editor for the majority of active sites.

Most people were forced into downloading the Classic Editor when they upgraded to WP 5.0. Many corporate security auditors demand that sites run an up to date version of WP. These corporate users had no choice but to upgrade to WP 5.0 and install the classic editor. Most of these users would have done this soon after WP 5.0 was released so it's expected that the number of downloads of the classic editor decreases after this time.

The fact that the number of downloads for the classic editor is trending down doesn't mean developers have converted their themes to use the block editor. Similarly the increase in the number of downloads for Gutenberg doesn't mean more active sites are using it.

Personally, I downloaded Gutenberg when it was beta to have a play with but we haven't spent the significant amount of time required to convert our existing production themes. I would be included in your early download statistics when in reality I'm our sites are only using the classic editor.

Cheers,

Ben