Download websites that use Download Monitor

About Download Monitor

Most WordPress plugins change how a page looks. A file download plugin changes what the site is for.

Download Monitor gives a WordPress site a catalogue of files, protected links to them and a log of who took what. Maintained by WPChill under the GPL v2 license and dating back to 2009, the plugin is written in PHP and adds version control for files, shortcodes that place download buttons inside ordinary content, and extensions covering access rules and payment. The feature that matters for classification is the log, because counting downloads is only worth doing when the file is part of the business.

Presence narrows the population of sites sharply. Software vendors distributing installers and release notes, manufacturers publishing spec sheets and manuals, record labels and media companies, associations serving documents to members, research groups publishing data: all of them need a file catalogue, and ordinary marketing sites do not. As of October 2026 we detect Download Monitor on 14,991 sites, 5,576 of them on domains registered in United States, with the suffix mix weighted to .com.

The release data adds a second axis. Across that base we count 101 distinct versions in use, and installs cluster on 5.2.9. A plugin whose history reaches back to 2009 accumulates a tail like that naturally, because a download page rarely breaks visibly when it goes stale and nothing about a working button prompts anyone to update. The tail matters more here than for a decorative plugin, since a download handler serves files to the public and older releases carry whatever assumptions about path handling and access control were normal in their era.

The log also hints at what the files are doing commercially. A site that merely links a PDF has no reason to install anything, so choosing a plugin that records downloads means somebody wanted the number. Downloads counted are usually downloads that matter, either because the file is the product, or because it sits behind a form and the download is a lead, or because a support team needs to know which manual and which firmware release people are actually taking. Gated distribution in particular puts the plugin next to a marketing operation rather than next to a media library.

Different buyers read the same list from opposite ends. Digital delivery and ecommerce platforms want sites that distribute files but have not yet charged for the distribution. Storage and content delivery vendors want sites whose bandwidth bill grows with every release they publish. Licensing and rights services want catalogues worth protecting. Security teams and managed hosts want the release distribution, because a public file handler is an attack surface with a version attached to it.

A per domain lookup answers whether one site uses the plugin. The dataset answers what no lookup can. How file distribution correlates with hosting and platform choice. Which markets beyond United States carry it. What ecommerce and membership tools appear alongside it. How the base splits between current releases and long stale ones.

Detection reads the asset paths, download endpoints and markup the plugin emits, so a site that routes downloads through rewritten URLs, restricts its catalogue to signed in members or concatenates its assets can run the plugin unseen. Undercounting is the direction of error. Release strings come from what a site exposes publicly rather than from what is installed on disk, which means the version distribution describes the visible part of the base and not necessarily all of it.