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Guides · Growth

All your plugin's downloads in one place: SpigotMC, Modrinth, Hangar, CurseForge and GitHub

Five sites, five download counters and no total. See them together, learn what each counter counts, and why downloads aren't installs.

Updated · by Skilled · 3 min read

Most plugins don't live in one place any more. SpigotMC is where server owners have always looked, Modrinth and Hangar are where Paper users increasingly go, CurseForge has its own audience, and GitHub Releases is where your most technical users grab builds. Each has its own download counter, its own page, and no idea the others exist.

So the question "how many downloads does my plugin have?" means opening five tabs and adding numbers by hand. And the more useful question, "which of these places is growing?", doesn't get answered at all.

What each counter really counts

Before adding them up, it helps to know they don't measure the same thing:

  • SpigotMC counts downloads of the resource, including people re-downloading every update. A plugin that updates weekly inflates its own count.
  • Modrinth counts downloads of every version, including launchers and tools that update automatically.
  • Hangar counts downloads per version, like Modrinth.
  • CurseForge counts downloads of every file, including installs through its app and modpacks.
  • GitHub Releases counts every downloaded asset. That includes checksums, source zips you attached and manifests, which aren't downloads of your plugin at all.

None of them is wrong, but none of them is "people who started using my plugin". Treat each as a trend, compare a counter with itself over time, and be careful comparing one platform's number with another's.

Seeing them together

PluginAnalytics reads all five every hour and draws them on one chart, each as its own line:

  • SpigotMC and Modrinth: connect the listing from the Listing page; search by name or paste the link.
  • Hangar, CurseForge and GitHub Releases: add them under More download sources: your Hangar project, your CurseForge project ID (it's in the About section of your project), and your GitHub repository. For GitHub you list the asset names that aren't downloads, like *.txt, *.json, *.sha256, and everything else counts.

Your dashboard's home page then shows the downloads of all your plugins and mods together. Listing analytics

Counting starts on the day each source is connected, so the chart grows from there; it doesn't invent history the sites don't publish.

The line that matters: downloads per day

Totals only go up. What tells you something is the number of downloads per day, per platform:

  • A jump on one platform only is something that happened there: a feature on Modrinth's homepage, a mention in a SpigotMC thread, a CurseForge modpack picking you up.
  • A jump everywhere at once is your release, or a video.
  • One platform slowly overtaking another is where your users are moving. It's worth putting your best screenshots and your newest docs there first.

Add a release marker in Settings when you ship an update or change a listing, and every chart shows it.

Downloads aren't installs

A download is a file that left a website. An install is a server that runs your plugin. The gap between them is bigger than most developers expect: people download to try, download every update, or download and never get past the first error.

That's why the Listing page shows the whole path, not just downloads:

  1. Viewed the listing: from a small tag in your SpigotMC or Modrinth description, since neither site shares page views with authors.
  2. Downloaded: SpigotMC and Modrinth.
  3. Installed: a new server sending its first data.
  4. Still running after 1, 7 and 30 days.

The view-to-download rate tells you whether your page sells the plugin. The download-to-install gap tells you whether people get it working. And the share still running after a week tells you whether it was worth installing. Each one has a different fix: the listing page, the setup, or the plugin itself. How many servers use my plugin?

A note on publishing everywhere

Being on every site isn't free: each one is another page to update, another changelog to post, another place for bug reports to land. Watch the per-platform lines for a couple of months. If a platform brings almost nothing, a short description pointing to your main page is enough there, and your time is better spent on the page that does.

Skilled

Makes Minecraft plugins (including The Sift on SpigotMC) and PluginAnalytics, so other plugin developers can see how their plugins are found, installed and used.

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