In this guide we will cover ways to install a WordPress plugin from WordPress.org and installing premium WordPress plugins.
- Installing a WordPress plugin fromWordPress.org
- Installing a WordPress plugin from a premium provider.
Installing From WordPress.org
WordPress.org plugins are totally free to download and use. All plugins on the WordPress.org site won’t require you to purchase in order to download and use the plugin. We will show you the most easiest way to install WordPress plugins from WordPress.org
- Login to your WordPress site as an administrator.
- Navigate to “Plugins” > “Add New” (Tip: Hover on “Plugins” but don’t click the link, this will bring up the submenu).
- Once on the Add Plugins page, you should see a few plugins ready to install. These are usually popular plugins WordPress recommends to use. In the upper right hand corner of the screen you should see a search bar, type in keywords as you would when you are Googling something. (Tip: If you are wanting to add food recipes to your blog, search recipes or food recipes).
- Once you’ve searched for your keywords, look for the plugin you would like to install and click “Install” and give it a minute or two to automatically download the files.
- The “Activate” option will appear once the plugin has been downloaded, click this button and now the plugin is running on your WordPress website.
Installing a Premium WordPress Plugin
The steps aren’t much different from the above, here’s how you can install a premium WordPress plugin from a .zip file.
- Download the .zip file from the site you purchased your plugin. At Yoohoo Plugins download links are automatically sent when purchased or you can download it later under your account page.
- Move your .zip file to your desktop or another working directory you can easily locate.
- Login to your WordPress website and navigate to “Plugins” and select “Add New”.
- Next to the heading of “Add New” there should be a button that says “Upload Plugin”, select this button.
- A new area will open up for manual file uploads, select “Choose File” and locate and select the file from step 1 & 2.
- Select the “Install Now” button, once installed you may need to activate your plugin as per the previous method.
Summary
In this guide it has shown two methods of installing WordPress plugins the “easy” way for both free and premium (usually paid) plugins.
Some additional notes of interest:
- When selecting a file from your computer, you can simply drag the .zip file onto the “Choose Now” button to automatically select that file.
- WordPress only accepts .zip files for upload via the WordPress dashboard and the content of the .zip file has to be the plugin’s folder.
- Some plugin companies may have multiple .zip files in a single .zip file (for bundle purchases) you may need to unzip the received zip folder first to get your other .zip files.
- Choosing the right plugin may be difficult, there are some things you may look out for in this guide we wrote.
Hopefully this will help beginners into installing plugins for WordPress and take your site to a new level of functionality!
Photo by Minnie Zhou on Unsplash
