After you have succesfully installed your WordPress blog or website, you need to add WordPress Plugins, this is one of your first steps towards a wonderful website.
What are WordPress plugins?
These are like small engines or PHP scripts that extend the functionality and perform certain roles in your website, such functions include sharing posts on social media, caching, optimize and speeding up and WordPress Sites, WooCommerce for an online store, block editors, photo gallerries, contact forms, booking appointment, Spam control, SEO, Data import and export among many other website needs. Plugins reduce coding time and gives your website tools.
WordPress Plugins enhance the features of WordPress, or add entirely new features to your site. Plugins are often developed by volunteers, and are usually free to the public. Plugins are available via the WordPress Plugin Directory.
There are thousands of free and paid plugins available for WordPress blogs/website and they keep developing them for new uses. Below is our step by step guide, on how to install, and uninstall a WordPress plugin.
Note: Although plugins you find here are thoroughly tested and considered safe to use, they are of varying quality and are often works in progress.
How to Find Plugins
You can browse and search for plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Each plugin listed there is available for download as a zip file you can upload to your WordPress site.
An alternative way to find and install plugins is from within the WordPress admin screens. Navigate to Plugins > Add New, and you can browse and search for plugins from within your dashboard. Each plugin listed there has an “Install Now” button so you can easily add it to your site.
How to instal WordPress Plugins
There are 3 ways to install WordPress plugins.
- Automatic Plugin Installation. Any plugin available on the WordPress Plugins Directory can be installed via the built-in plugin installer.
- Upload via WordPress Admin. You can easily add a new plugin by uploading a zip archive of the plugin from your local computer.
- Manual Plugin Installation. In some cases, you may need to manually upload a plugin directly using the Cpanel or FTP client like FileZilla.
1. Automatic Plugin Installation
This is the simplest method of installing a plugin. To add a plugin using the built-in plugin installer:
- Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
- Use the search form in the top-right to search by keyword, author or tag.
- On the search results that appear, click a plugin’s title to read more about it. This page may contain installation notes, plugin documentation or other useful information.
- Click the Install Now button to install the plugin.
- Click Activate to activate the plugin.
2. Manual Upload via WordPress Admin
If you have a copy of the plugin as a zip file, you can manually upload it and install it through the Plugins admin screen.
- Navigate to Plugins > Add New.
- Click the Upload Plugin button at the top of the screen.
- Select the zip file from your local filesystem.
- Click the Install Now button.
- When installation is complete, you’ll see “Plugin installed successfully.” Click the Activate Plugin button at the bottom of the page.
3. Manual Plugin Installation via CPanel or FTP
In rare cases, you may need to install a plugin by manually transferring the files onto the server. This is recommended only when absolutely necessary, for example when your server is not configured to allow automatic installations.
This procedure requires you to be familiar with the process of transferring files using an SFTP client.
Warning: this process may put your site at risk if you install a WordPress plugin incompatible with the current version or from an unreliable source. Back up your site completely before proceeding.
- If your plugin is in the form of a zip file, unzip the contents. You should see a single folder named after the plugin.
- Look in the plugin folder for a readme.txt file. Read the file to confirm that this is the correct plugin, and to look for any special instructions.
- Connect to your WordPress server with your SFTP client.
- Copy the plugin folder to the wp-content/plugins folder in your WordPress directory. This installs the plugin to your WordPress site.
- Navigate to your Plugins admin screen and locate the newly uploaded plugin in the list.
- Click the plugin’s “Activate” link.
- If there is one, click the plugin’s “View details” link to learn more about the plugin.
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