How To Install A Plugin In WordPress

WordPress has some nice features by itself but you can do a whole lot more by installing plugins which can turn your blog into an E-Commerce store, add a photo gallery with a feed from Flickr along with many other uses. While this post is going to detail how to manually install a plugin into WordPress it will also showcase how to use the auto installer that was implemented in version 2.7.

Auto installing a plugin with 2.7+

Thanks to the crafty developers who have created WordPress, even those who know nothing about FTP and uploading files can easily install plugins onto their blog. If you are using version 2.7 or above all that you need to do is click the Plugins section on the left hand side of the screen and then click Add New. The Add New link will take you to a page that lets you search for plugins as well as allowing you to upload an already downloaded plugin that is contained within a .zip file.

The page also provides you with a list of the popular tags that exist within the WordPress Plugin Directory. Lets do a search for the WP-DB-Backup plugin which I personally use. In order to get the list of plugins shown below, I just typed wp db backup into the search box and hit Search.

Then, click on the WP-DB-Backup link in the list and you should see a popup box show up with information about the plugin.

In order to install the plugin, click the bright orange button and let WordPress do it’s magic.

If everything went ok you should be presented with a progress page that ultimately notifies you that the plugin was successfully installed. Then all that is left to do is to click the Activate Plugin link and you are all set! Easy enough right?

Manually installing a plugin

If you aren’t using version 2.7+ (you should be!) or you just want to learn how to do it, read on. In order to get the plugin working on your blog you need to first download the .zip file that contains the files for the plugin. You can find a huge list of WordPress plugins by searching the WordPress Plugins Directory or by performing a search on Google.

Once you have found the plugin that you desire, download it and then extract the plugin folder from the .zip file onto your computer. Then, connect to your webserver through your FTP program or you web host’s file manager and navigate to your main directory that contains the WordPress installation. This directory should contain at least 3 folders; wp-content, wp-admin and wp-includes along with several other files. Open up the wp-content directory, then open up the plugins directory found inside.

From here, upload the plugin’s folder into the plugins folder. After the files have been uploaded, log into your WordPress Admin Dashboard and click on the Plugins section. You will be presented with a list of current, recently activated plugins and plugins that you currently do not have activated. Scroll down to the list of plugins that are not activated and click the Activate link next to your plugin that you just uploaded.

You will receive a confirmation message at the top of the screen notifying you that the plugin was activated. Thats it! You may or may not need to configure the settings of the plugin depending on what the plugin does. You can usually find the settings page listed under the Settings section although some plugins may be listed under the Tools section.

I hope that you enjoyed this post, if you have any questions or comments about any of the things that I explained you are more then welcome to leave a comment below or contact me.

Feedback!

If you read this post and understood it great! Let me know in the comments below. If you are still having issues and can't get it figured out, you are more than welcome to leave a comment or send me an email using the contact form and I'll do what I can to help!