WordPress plugins are super functional codes written in php language to extend the functionality of any website on WordPress. So far WordPress is the most popular blogging platform and has the largest library of more than 30,000 free plugins and growing.

wordpress plugins

With wordpress plugins, you don’t have to touch a piece of code and you will still be able to do SEO of your blog, sharing on social networks, backing up your blog, creating sitemaps, checking traffic stats and can do virtually anything you want.

After the installation of WordPress now its time to make your Blog/Website  a bit different from others. Lets see how to make it with just few steps and few clicks.

Installing a Plugin in your WordPress Blog/Website Automatically

Installing Plugins in WordPress from your Dashboard is really easy and pretty straightforward job like applying a butter to a bread. There are also premium plugins available out there but it depends on your requirement. So lets try it and you will find it definitely easy after going through the post.

Step 1: After you are logged in on your Dashboard you will find a list of menus in the left hand side of the Dashboard. Here’s the figure shown below.

plugin

Step 2 : Just take your mouse cursor to the plugins option there you will find three options, just click on the ‘Add New’ option. After a while you will be directed to a new page ‘Add Plugins’. You will see their a variety of plugins which are basically the Default WordPress plugin. Check for the plugin which are in need of, if you can’t find it out then just make a Search in the search box.

Step 3 : After you find the plugin just click on the ‘Install Now’ option as shown in the figure below.

plugin1

The required plugin will automatically install in your Blog/Website, you can check it out in the ‘Installed Plugins’ option.

Step 4: Now if you want to activate the plugin into your Blog/Website just click on the ‘Activate’ option mentioned there.

 Hurray ! Finally you have installed a plugin and also activated it into your Blog/Website.

Now after the Automatic Installation of the plugin now lets move a little further.

Installing a plugin directly on your web hosting server using FTP?

There are times when you want to Install 3rd Party plugins which are not the part of Free WordPress plugins directory. In this case, you need to know this method, because 3rd party plugins comes with a lot of files and directories that wordpress plugin installer can’t handle.

The manually installing method of a plugin is usually based on FTP ( File Transfer Protocol ).Usually in WordPress there is no need of knowing the concept of ‘Manually’ installing  but the concept is very much helpful for the users in long run. Lets see how it is done ?

Step 1: Visit the Plugins Directory in WordPress.org website and download the necessary plugin. The reason why we are using the free plugin is because we don’t want to buy you a premium plugin to learn how to do it.

Step 2: The downloaded file will be a .zip file as plugins are stored in Zip format. Unzip and extract the plugin files and save the plugins in a safe place in your computer.

Step 3:  Now connect to your Blog/Website’s Server using FTP.

Step 4: Now after the connection is established, locate

‘wp-content/plugins’

directory in your WordPress installation Blog/Website. After that Upload the extracted plugin file in the directory.

Step 5: Now navigate to your WordPress Dashboard/Admin panel of your Blog/Website and you will find the new plugin listed among other plugins. Just activate the plugin and you are done.

The above mentioned methods are really very easy and simple methods. Hope you like them. Enjoy Blogging in WordPress.

Extra Tips:

  1. You can also upload a WordPress plugin if you have the downloaded file from your dashboard.
  2. If you find any kind of difficulty in connecting to your server kindly contact to your Hosting provider. They will certainly help you out.
  3. If you are looking for a lot of great WordPress plugins, check out the envato marketplace – CodeCanyon and you will never be disappointed.
  4. Do not Install too many WordPress Plugins as this will slow down your website. Plugins are nothing but lines of php codes that needs to be run before showing you the display of a particular page on your site. Installing too much plugins, will always be the main cause of slow speed issues and long page load times.
  5. If you are new to WordPress and have different types of queries then you must check out our WordPress Beginner Guides section.