• Home
  • Themes
    • Theme Tutorials
    • Theme Collections
  • Free Themes
    • Pasco
    • Porton
    • Madrin
    • EMO
  • Plugins
    • Plugin Tutorials
    • Plugin Collections
  • Blogs
    • How To
    • Beginners
      • Steps To Make a WordPress Website
      • Customize your Admin Area in WordPress
    • News
  • Contact
  • Support Forum
WordPress Themes, Plugins, Articles & much more - WordPress Themes Collection WordPress Themes, Plugins, Articles & much more - WordPress Themes Collection
  • Home
  • Guides
  • Beginners
  • How to install Plugins in WordPress
June 20, 2016

How to install Plugins in WordPress

Beginners/How To/Plugin Tutorials
How to install Plugins in WordPress

What are PLUGINs

“Plugins” means extensions that are complement the functionality you need, such as adding features, gallary or slideshow to your site that don’t come built-in.
For example, you can easily install a free plugin for your websites to get functional displays related posts at the bottom of each article. You can use plugins to do everything from adding photo galleries and submission forms to optimizing your website and creating an online store.

There are over 25,000 different FREE plugins of plugins available for WordPress and similar to themes, there are paid plugins that bring unique features and useful to your website (price of these plugins depend on the complexity)
Note: If you are using WordPress.com you cannot install plugins.

How do I Install a new Plugin?

There are three different Ways To Install WordPress Plugin (For beginners using localhost, here we will talk about most common and easy way and will talk about FTP way in brief)

Search and install

To start installing plugins, you need login to your blog dashboard go to “Plugins -> Add New” and simply start searching by typing directly the plugins name or the functionality to “Search” box. For example, I am searching the plugin called “Akismet” which checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam.

plugin-addnew

Search plugins

Once you find a plugin you want, just click “Install” button, then you will see the success message with a link to activate the plugin or return to plugin installer. Now the plugin was installed but it hasn’t worked yet unless you activate it. So once you installed the plugin, you need to activate it by clicking on the “Activate Plugin” link.

plugin-activate

Activate Plugin

Upload and install

The WordPress plugin directory doesn’t list paid WordPress plugins. It means that these plugins cannot be installed using the first method. That’s why WordPress has the “Upload Plugin” option to install such plugins.
First, after downloading the plugin (which will be a zip file) from WordPress plugin library, you need to go to “Plugins » Add New” page and click on the “Upload Plugin” button on top of the page.

plugin-upload1

Upload Plugin

Then you simply choose and upload the plugin folder, and the same as above method, the plugin will be installed and you need to activate the plugin to use.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

In FTP method, you download the WP plugin from the source, unzip and upload the plugin to your WordPress plugin library using FTP software such as FileZilla or Cyberduck, then activate and configure it. Whereas, in dashboard method, you need to search, find, install and activate the plugin.

Once you are done uploading the file in unzipped format, you can simply go to WordPress plugins folder under WP dashboard and activate the plugin.
The FTP manager method is the least friendly for beginners. However, this is very useful in some cases, your WordPress hosting provider may have file restrictions that could limit your ability to install a plugin from Dashboard.

Personally I prefer using dashboard search and upload feature and only in specific cases, I needed to use FTP method. Some time, because of some faulty of plugins conflicts, you might face issue while accessing your dashboard, you simply log in to your FTP account and disable that plugin by either renaming it or deleting it.

The most popular and useful plugins in WordPress (for free)

To save you some time, I’ve put together a list of the most popular and useful plugins that webmasters find useful:

#1 Contact form 7:  It’s an awesome feature to have, as people (like you!) can fill in the form and send me an email without logging into their own email provider. If you want to do something similar, definitely get this plugin.
#2 Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
#3 MailChimp for WordPress This plugin help you to adds various highly effective sign-up methods to your site.
#4: ReplyMe: Send a email to author automatically while someone reply his comment.
#5  Yoast SEO: If you want to make your WordPress site even more SEO-friendly, this plugin is a must-have. It’s free, and it’s awesome. You’ll be able to edit your title tags, meta descriptions and more, all from within the page itself – no more fussing with WordPress settings.
#6 Responsive Lightbox allows users to view larger versions of images and galleries in a lightbox (overlay) effect optimized for mobile devices.

Notice:

  • WordPress now only accept .zip format for WordPress plugins and themes upload.
  • Whenever, you need to read the documentation before installing a new WP plugin.

Plugins are additional tools that you can add to your WordPress blog from third-party developers. There are hundreds of free plugins available that can do just about anything on your WordPress Website.

—————

I hope this tutorial helped you know what plugins are and how to install Plugins in WordPress, you may also want to check out our guide on how to add new and manage users or other instructions in this series.
See you soon in next step!!

add plugininstall pluginPlugin wordpress
Previous Post
How to customize WordPress theme
Next Post
How to add new & manage Users
Avatar

g5plusacc

You May Also Like

7 Tips for WordPress Beginners
May 31, 2019

7 Tips for WordPress Beginners

Why Your Business Website Should Switch to WordPress
May 22, 2019

Why Your Business Website Should Switch to WordPress

8 Ways Help Your WordPress Site Get More Traffic
May 17, 2019

8 Ways Help Your WordPress Site Get More Traffic

The Tips to Promote Your Blog Posts
April 23, 2019

The Tips to Promote Your Blog Posts

Three Steps to Have Your First WordPress Website
April 16, 2019

Three Steps to Have Your First WordPress Website

How To Create A Landing Page For Your Small Business
March 22, 2019

How To Create A Landing Page For Your Small Business

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Post

7 Tips for WordPress Beginners
7 Tips for WordPress Beginners
May 31, 2019
Why Your Business Website Should Switch to WordPress
Why Your Business Website Should Switch to WordPress
May 22, 2019
8 Ways Help Your WordPress Site Get More Traffic
8 Ways Help Your WordPress Site Get More Traffic
May 17, 2019
The 15+ Best Free WordPress Themes 2019
The 15+ Best Free WordPress Themes 2019
May 2, 2019

Categories

  • Guides
    • Beginners
    • How To
  • News
  • Plugins
    • Plugin Collections
    • Plugin Tutorials
  • Themes
    • Free Themes
    • Theme Collections
    • Theme Tutorials

SharePress is an online WordPress library which focuses on WordPress tutorials, How-to’s, guides, themes, plugins, news, and more. We are here to help you!!

Userful Link

  • ThemeForest
  • Beginners
  • How To
  • News

Subscribe & Follow

Subscribe to my Newsletter

© 2016 - 2018 - sharepress.net. All Rights Reserved.