Download websites that use WooCommerce PayPal Payments

About WooCommerce PayPal Payments

Before WooCommerce PayPal Payments can appear on a checkout page, somebody has handed a processor a business name, a bank account and enough identity evidence to pass review. The official PayPal extension for WooCommerce, released in 2021 under GPL v2, therefore marks a business rather than a project, and a business that expects to be paid.

A plugin this young with a footprint this size did not grow on new stores alone. Much of the install base arrived by migration, as older integrations were retired and shops moved to the supported replacement, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because a host or an agency ran the update for them. As of October 2026 we see the extension on 15,702 domains, 6,071 of them in United States and mostly on .com registrations.

Version data matters more here than it does for a decorative plugin. We record 79 distinct versions in the wild, with 4.1.3 recurring across much of the set and a tail of older builds behind it. A payment plugin drifting behind its release line is a practical problem rather than a cosmetic one, because gateways deprecate API versions, tighten authentication rules and change what a compliant checkout has to send. Stores stuck on old builds are the ones that break on a gateway deadline, and they are also the stores whose maintenance nobody is currently doing.

The useful research question is rarely whether a given shop takes card payments through this route. The useful question is what the payment layer implies about the rest of the business. A store running the official extension is on WooCommerce, therefore on WordPress and on PHP, therefore self hosted rather than locked inside a closed platform, and therefore able to install anything else worth selling to it. Payment providers use populations like this to size switching opportunities. Ecommerce vendors use them to find self hosted merchants at the scale where a hosted platform starts to look attractive. Fraud and compliance researchers use them to study which checkout stacks cluster in which markets.

Detection is inferential and conservative. The plugin is identified from the assets and endpoints a checkout page loads, so a shop whose product pages never expose the payment layer, whose checkout sits behind a login, or whose scripts are merged into one bundle can be missed. A gateway configured but switched off still leaves traces, so the count also includes merchants who are not currently taking money through it. The figure describes observable installation, never transaction volume.

A single lookup confirms one merchant's checkout. The export supports the questions that need the whole set at once: how gateway choice varies by country and suffix, how fast a version population turns over after a release, and which other commercial extensions the same stores run. Cross referencing payment tooling against shipping, tax and subscription plugins is how a hobby shop gets separated from an operating retailer.