As a beginner in your blogging journey, it is very important to know, How to install a WordPress plugin? But the question is what is a plugin and why I need to install it?
What is a Plugin on WordPress?
Can You Use WordPress Plugins at WordPress.com?
WordPress plugins are so effective that they can totally change a WordPress website into an e-commerce store, a community website, forum, or a social networking site.
WordPress plugins are a gold mine for all those people who are not familiar with coding knowledge. With the help of the plugins, people can easily deal with their online business requirements.
Plugins can build a website, optimize its performance, rank it better in search engines, engage with the audience, and much more.
So in this article, I’ll guide you on how you can install a plugin into your WordPress website.
How to install WordPress Plugin?
After a basic idea of a WordPress plugin, further, in this article, we will discuss all ways to install a plugin on a WordPress website.
If you like to watch the video tutorial, then the following video explains how to install a WordPress plugin?
And, If you like text version of the tutorial, then follow the step-by-step guide.
You can install wordPress plugin usually in 3 ways.
- From WordPress respiratory by plugin search.
- By uploading the plugin
- Via FTP, account in cPanel.
We will cover all these ways in this article. Let’s get started.
Install a plugin From WordPress respiratory by plugin search:
The first method is the easiest method and we will use the WordPress plugin directory. It sounds complicated, but it’s really not.
There are almost 60,000 free plugins available in the WordPress directory. And You have access to all these plugins if you use wordpress.org to build your website. A lot of plugins are available even to add a single functionality to your website.
In your WordPress dashboard, you’ll find the plugins area and you can click add new. When we click add new, we take to the WordPress plugin directory.
These are all the free plugins available that you can install on your site. To find the one that you’re looking forward we want to search for the plugin. Even if you didn’t know the exact name of the plugin, you can type your requirement.
For example, in our case, we want to add a contact form to our website. We just type contact form and it searches all available plugins in the directory, performing the same furcation that we need.
You can also visit popular and recommended plugins by clicking the filter tabs.
We’ll do WPForms. That’s a great contact form plugin that you can install. So we’ll find it and this is the one we’re looking for. Let’s install it now.
Do two things with any plugin you want to add to your website install and activate it, which means you want to make sure that it goes live on your site and uses it.
Once I click to activate, it’ll activate the plugin and each plugin will be different, for the
If you are not sure, which plugin has to install? WordPress also shows active installations of the plugin, user rating update date, and compatibility with your WordPress version. You can get an idea from these stats.
After pressing the activate button, you have successfully installed the plugin, and it is active to perform its action. Now you have to just configure the plugin.
Install a plugin by uploading it manually:
Premium and paid plugins are not available in the WordPress directory. So we can not install premium plugins by the method explained above.
We can install premium plugins by uploading them from the WordPress dashboard. In this method, I’ll show you how you can install WordPress plugin manually to your WordPress website.
To install WordPress plugin manually, you need a zip file of the plugin source (Must be a .zip file). You can upload this plugin zip file to your admin dashboard.
Where I can download a plugin?
After downloading the zip file of the plugin source, just visit Plugins » Add New and click the “Upload plugin”
After clicking the upload button, there appears a form to upload the zip file of the plugin. Click the “choose file” and upload the file from the local storage you download earlier.
Select the file and press “install now“. Plugin source file will be uploaded and installed.
Success message of installed plugin appears just click “activate plugin“. The plugin will be active to perform the function you have to configure it now.
Install Plugin using cPanel or FTP Client:
If you face file restrictions from your hosting provider or max file size limit issue, then it is difficult to upload a WordPress plugin from the dashboard.
Here, you can directly upload the plugin in your file manager from the cPanel or by using FTP client. This method may be difficult for beginners and definitely less user-friendly.
In this method you need to have downloaded zip file of the plugin and cPanel or FTP client access.
After logging in to your cPanel, from the file manager, navigate to the root directory of your website. And select the /wp-content/plugins/ folder and upload the zip file here.
After uploading the zip file, you need to extract the zip file here. It will create a folder with the same name as plugin and after extracting delete the zip file.
After the upload and extraction complete, visit the installed plugins in the WordPress dashboard. you find that it successfully installed the plugin.
Just activate the plugin and it will be active to perform its function. Now you need to configure it.
Install WordPress Plugins via WP-CLI:
The final way to install the plugin is via WP-CLI (WordPress Command-Line tool). Developers usually use this method to increase WordPress developer’s workflows.
After Launching the CLI you need to try a few commands to install a plugin. And you just have to know the exact name of the WordPress plugin from the directory. We can find it in the plugin URL on WordPress.org.
wp plugin install lightweight-accordionNow to activate the Plugin, run the following command.
wp plugin Activate lightweight-accordionAnd finally the plugin is installed and activated quickly.
You can checkout WP-CLI documentation to learn about it.
If you have further questions please read the FAQs given below.
FAQs About WordPress Plugin installation:
Here we have listed a few questions people often asked about plugin installation in wordpress website.
What is a plugin in WordPress?
A WordPress plugin is a small piece of PHP code that can be added to your website to extend its functionality and add additional features to your WordPress website. For example, to add a contact form easily to your website you can add WPForms or Contact Form 7 plugins free from WordPress respiratory.
Can You Use WordPress Plugins at WordPress.com?
No, WordPress.com does not allow installing WordPress plugins unless you upgrade your plan to a business plan. And Self-hosted websites can easily install any plugins to their website.
Where to find WordPress Plugins?
You can get a zip file of free WordPress plugins from WordPress.org (official and best WordPress plugin source). to use premium or 3rd party plugins you can visit Code Canyon that is the biggest source of premium WordPress plugins in the market.
How to install WordPress plugin from zip?
Simply you can upload a zip file of the plugin resource from the wordpress dashboard to install the plugin. Or you can directly upload the plugin to your website via cPanel or FTP client.
Can’t install plugin WordPress?
Your plugin maybe failed to install due to PHP memory limit Issues used by Php scripts. When some process reaches this limit, it gets terminated or gives an error. It can be solved
wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’);
How to install WordPress plugin without FTP?
You can install the plugin from the WordPress dashboard via plugin search or upload plugin. The plugin can also be directly uploaded to Hosting cPanel File Manager in wp-content/Plugin.
How to install WordPress plugin manually?
1. Download the Plugin Zip file.
2. Log in to the WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins -> Add New.
3. Click the Upload Plugin button from the top of the page.
4. Select Choose File and upload the plugin file from your computer.
5. Press Install Now.
6. Activate the Plugin.
Conclusion:
Plugins are helpful to enhance the functionality of a website without any prior knowledge of coding. Thousands of Both free and paid plugins are available in the WordPress market. Plugins can be added from the WordPress dashboard via plugin search and uploading the plugin.
Manually plugin can be installed by FTP client or WP-CLI method. These two methods are little bit technical and may be less user friendly for beginners.
I hope you got it that “How to install a WordPress plugin” . If you liked this guidance, share it with your social community.
