How to Install a WordPress Plugin (3 Different Methods)

Key Takeaways

if you've just installed wordpress then you're probably looking for a way to install the plugins that you need for your website if that's you then keep watching because in this video i'll show you three methods that you can use to install a plugin on your site the first method is the easiest method and we will be using the wordpress plugin directory it sounds complicated but it's really not from your wordpress dashboard you'll look for the plugins area and you want to click add new when you click add new it takes us to this whole area this is 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 for we want to search for the plugin we'll do wp forms that's a great contact form that you can install so we'll find it and this is the one we're looking for let's go ahead and install it now and you have to do two things with any plugin you'll want to install it but then you want to activate it which means you want to make sure that it goes live on your site and that you can utilize it once i click activate it'll activate the plugin and each plugin will be different for the wp forms i am now taken to the dashboard of the form where it easily walks me through how to create my first form so that's the first method and it's by far the easiest but it's also utilizing only the free plugins that are on the wordpress directory now the next method is say you've purchased the plugin and you've downloaded it from the plugin website you'll need to upload it on your own so let's do that next we want to go back over to our plugins area we can click add new again and instead of doing the search plugins area we want to click on the upload plugin button up here so we'll click upload and now we can choose the file and we need to search for it on our computer from here you can either click choose file or if you have it open you can left click the zip folder and drag it and then you see it here once you choose the file you want to click install now and then it will go through and install the plugin that you just uploaded again once it's installed you'll be prompted to activate the plugin if you need to activate it right now and if you don't want to activate it you can go to your installed plugins and you can see the status of them where we only have our wp forms light activated you can tell by the blue and these two are still not activated from here you can activate any any of them you can also delete them you can deactivate them if you don't want to use that plugin anymore so that's method two now method three is very similar to method two however instead of uploading it through our plugins admin area we'll be using an ftp client there are several ftp clients that you can choose from i'll be using filezilla for this tutorial if you're not familiar with ftp clients then you can view our ftp video on how to get started with that once you connect to your website make sure that you go into your plugins folder to do that i'll show you will drake will drill down into the public html i need to go to wp content that is where all of our themes and plugins are kept and right here you see our plugins page and here are the three plugins that we have what you need to do is when you download your zip file from the website that you've purchased your plugin you'll also need to unzip the file so that you can upload just the folder so we need to do that next so you see here i have my update monster zip file so we need to right click and extract all browse where we want it to go select that folder and we do want to see the extracted files when complete so let's click extract and now we see this folder here what you want to do is make sure that when you click on the folder you have all of these subfolders and files beneath that folder we're happy with this so now let's go back to our ftp client i'm going to right click refresh so i can see all of the items here and what i want to do is bring this folder and upload it over here so all you need to do is right click click upload and now it will upload all of the folders into my plugins area on my website and when it's finished we can head back over to our plugins page and you'll want to click refresh or just click the install plugins again and when you do that you now see that the plugin that we just uploaded is here when you upload via ftp it automatically uploads but it does not activate so anything that you want to activate make sure you come back over here to your install plugins area and activate the plugins that you need to and that's the simple way of how you can install a plugin on your wordpress website did you learn something from today's video if so subscribe to our youtube channel and we'll send more helpful tips to help you manage your wordpress website and thanks for watching