Three years ago, on October 15th, 2022, I officially released the very first version of the free “Simple Cloudflare Turnstile” plugin (now known as “Simple CAPTCHA Alternative for Cloudflare Turnstile“).
What started as a quick and simple plugin that I developed in response to a new free service offered by Cloudflare, has grown exponentially, and is now used by over 100,000 WordPress websites.
I wanted to take a moment to look back at how this all began, share some statistics, and talk about the journey of managing a plugin for free, that has grown far beyond my initial expectations.
Why did I develop a plugin for Cloudflare Turnstile?
In 2022, I was already familiar with CAPTCHA plugins, having previously developed a free reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce plugin that has over 30,000 active installs.
So, when Cloudflare announced they were launching Turnstile, a privacy-focused and user-friendly CAPTCHA alternative, I immediately saw an opportunity.
At that time, no other free plugins for Turnstile existed.
I quickly forked the existing code from my reCAPTCHA plugin, made the necessary changes, and managed to publish Simple Cloudflare Turnstile on the WordPress.org directory incredibly fast.
This rapid response, followed by weeks of continuous improvements and new integrations, definitely played a key role in the plugin’s early success.
The Numbers & Statistics
The growth of the plugin has been phenomenal, and I’m constantly amazed by the pace as it keeps in growing exponentially.
The numbers below show the acceleration of adoption, especially over the last year.
Growth Timeline (Active Installs)
| Milestone | Date Reached | Average Growth |
| 🚀 10k | 1 April 2023 | ~1.8k/month |
| 🚀 20k | 10 August 2023 | ~2.5k/month |
| 🚀 30k | 13 January 2024 | ~2k/month |
| 🚀 50k | 22 August 2024 | ~2.85k/month |
| 🚀 60k | 26 December 2024 | ~2.5k/month |
| 🚀 80k | 22 April 2025 | ~5k/month |
| 🎉 100k | 31st July 2025 | ~5.8k/month |
Here’s some other interesting statistics:
- Overall Turnstile Usage: Simple Cloudflare Turnstile accounts for around 15%-30% of all websites on the internet that are currently using Cloudflare Turnstile (if this “builtwith” report is correct).
- WordPress “Turnstile” Plugins: The plugin has by far the largest install count of any Turnstile plugin on WordPress.org. It ranks #1 on the directory search for many popular search terms like “Turnstile”, “CAPTCHA”, and “Cloudflare”, and ranks extremely well on Google search too.
- Website Traffic: The “setup guide” link on the plugin settings page is now a significant source of traffic for my business site at RelyWP, bringing in an average of 600-800 visits every single month.
- Reviews: The plugin has over 190 reviews on WordPress.org, with a rating of 4.7/5. There is also a significant amount of reviews and tutorials on popular blogs and YouTube videos which definitely helped with the growth!
Managing the Popularity
Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I launched the plugin, but I certainly didn’t anticipate it becoming this popular.
Most importantly, the time commitment, especially in the first 12 months, was far greater than I planned.
While the community interaction has been overwhelmingly positive, receiving a huge amount of constructive feedback and suggestions from users and other developers, the support requests became quite a handful to manage on my own.
I was juggling posts on the forums, tags on social media, direct messages, and emails. This is to be expected with a popular plugin, but it can be time-consuming when you have other projects to focus on too.
Unfortunately, as I assume happens with most popular plugins, I have occasionally run into a few impolite support interactions, where users aggressively expect premium-level support or prioritised feature additions.
To better manage expectations and set boundaries, I made the decision earlier this year to add a sticky post in the plugin’s support forums, clarifying the process:
This change has made some difference, ensuring most people post support requests in the forums and know what to expect, though it’s still not 100% effective with some users still trying to get support through other methods, or expecting fast support.
As the plugin has continued to grow even more rapidly, the amount of support tickets has also continued to grow.
Although I’ve had to slow down on my response times this year to focus on other things, I still continue to actively monitor the forums for important bugs and suggestions, and provide responses when I can.
One positive note on the support forums, it especially nice to see other members of the community occasionally respond to support threads before I do, helping out other community members with their issues or questions.
Thinking About the Future: To Monetize or Not?
Development for the plugin has naturally slowed down a little this year as my time has been allocated to my other projects.
However, I am fully committed to continuing to maintain, improve, and support the plugin going forward.
This leads me to something I have been thinking about recently, while the plugin has provided some great exposure and traffic, the effort required to manage 100,000+ active sites, and thousands of new users each month, is quite a lot.
I’ve begun thinking about ways to make the time spent a little more feasible.
One potential path is to explore the idea of a premium version that offers advanced features, priority support, and integrations that aren’t necessary for the core functionality.
Crucially, the current, popular version of the plugin would remain 100% free and fully maintained. The goal would be to add value, not affect the free offering that the community loves.
I’ve still not made a decision on this, and am still leaning towards keeping it 100% free. It is a big decision to make, and I’d like to avoid causing any confusion that may be caused by adding a premium version.
If you have any ideas, please feel free to get in touch and let me know.
For now, I have simply decided to create a new sponsor me page on GitHub, making it easier for people (or companies) to help sponsor the development of my free plugins.
Thank You
None of the growth of the plugin would have been possible without the WordPress community.
Thank you to every single person who has installed the plugin, written a kind review, published a tutorial, offered a constructive suggestion, or even sent a donation.
Your support has helped me with this journey and turned a simple weekend project into a highly successful free tool used by hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.
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