There’s a question almost nobody asks before installing software, and it predicts more grief than any feature comparison: how many people keep this alive?
Not how many people use it. How many people maintain it. The number is public, it takes five minutes to find, and it changed how I run my sites.
A story about one man and a great theme
For years my fiction site ran on Fictioneer, and I’ll repeat what I said earlier in this series: it’s an excellent theme, the best tool that exists for running serial fiction on WordPress. Its developer, Tetrakern, built something the big commercial shops never bothered to build, and built it with obvious love. Reading the code, you can feel a single coherent mind at work, and that’s the quality the Frankenstein themes from the assembly lines lack.
And that’s the problem. A single coherent mind is one mind. One person to fix bugs, one person to chase compatibility with every new WordPress release, one person to answer the support threads, one person between the theme and abandonment. Following the project over time, I noticed the small signals anyone can learn to read: releases still coming, bugs still fixed, and alongside them, the occasional weary comment from a maintainer who plainly loves the work and just as plainly carries all of it alone.
I want to be fair to him: nothing about the project was failing. This is a story about arithmetic, not neglect.
Because I’d built a serious part of my business on those custom structures, my content had grown around the theme the way content does. Which meant my fiction platform’s future was, in a real sense, one person’s hobby energy. No malice required, no failure required. A new job, a health problem, or simple burnout, and the software holding my stories would begin drifting out of compatibility, one WordPress release at a time.
I left, eventually, for exactly that reason, and it remains the most respectful divorce I have ever conducted. The theme was excellent. The bus factor was one.
What is the bus factor in software?
Engineers call it the bus factor: how many people would have to be hit by a bus before the project dies. It sounds morbid because it is, and it’s the single most underrated number in software selection.
A bus factor of one isn’t rare in the WordPress world. It’s the norm. The directory is full of beloved plugins and themes maintained by one person in their evenings, and most of the time that works, until the evening they stop. Abandonment is rarely announced. It looks like an update that never comes, then a compatibility warning, then a security advisory nobody patches.
And an unmaintained plugin isn’t merely stale; as my own incident demonstrated, orphaned and quietly sold projects are exactly how attackers acquire trusted channels into hundreds of thousands of sites.
Checking the number takes minutes. Look at who publishes the software and whether that’s a person or an organization. Look at the changelog: steady releases across years, or a burst of energy followed by silence? Read the support forum: are questions answered, and by whom, and in what tone? A maintainer answering every thread personally is admirable and is also a bus factor of one introducing himself.
The gradient, revisited
Now combine this with the lock-in gradient from the page builder article, because the two multiply.
A shallow tool with a bus factor of one is a small risk: if it dies, you swap it in an afternoon. A embedded tool with a bus factor of one is a different animal entirely. That’s your content grown around a fence post that one person maintains. The deeper the embedding, the more the maintainer count matters, until at the deepest end, the full builders and platforms, you should be reading the vendor’s staffing the way you’d read a landlord’s finances.
This cuts against instinct, because the embedded tools feel safest. They’re polished, popular, everywhere. But popularity measures adoption, not durability, and even big teams sell catalogs, pivot, or fold. The question is never whether the software is good today. It’s who’s contractually, financially, or emotionally bound to keep it good in year five.
What to do with the number
I’m not telling you to boycott solo developers. Some of the best software in the world is one person’s obsession, and Fictioneer proves it. I’m telling you to price the number in.
For shallow tools, a bus factor of one is fine. Enjoy the craftsmanship.
For anything embedded, demand a higher number or a proven exit. Either multiple maintainers with an organization behind them, or software that stores your content in structures that survive its death. One or the other. Insisting on both is how the cautious sleep.
For everything already on your site, check the pulse yearly. The maintainer situation that was healthy at install has had years to change, and the check costs five minutes per plugin. The annual audit from the previous article is the natural place for it.
And when you find a beloved tool with a bus factor of one holding something your business depends on, do what I did: thank the maintainer sincerely, and start planning your independence while everything is still working. The worst time to leave is after the last update never arrives.
Next in the series: the update channels themselves, and how attackers stopped breaking into websites and started buying the roads that lead to them. That story, including the hostile computer that can hide inside a cable, is The Supply Chain Is the Attack Surface. And if you want an experienced eye on the bus factors holding up your own site, that’s work I do.
Frequently Asked Questions