I’m gonna show you how to download, upload, and install WordPress plugins manually.
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The first thing you need to do is go to WordPress.org and click on Extend, and then either click on Plugins here, or click on the Plugins Directory link. And here, you can see there are over 5,000 WordPress plugins that you can download and use for free. Now, if you know the exact name of the plugin you are looking for, then you can just type in the name here, and click on Search for Plugins. On the right-hand section, you will also be able to see some of the most popular WordPress plugins as well as the newest plugins and the plugins that have been recently updated.
So I’m going to try to download one of the most popular WordPress plugins. I’m going to download Google XML Sitemaps. On this page, I’ll be able to see some description about the plugin, and also some installation notes…all right, FAQs; screenshots; some other notes by the author, the creator of the plugin; and also statistics to see how many downloads per day does this particular plugin get.
Now, some plugins may not have that much of information; in fact, some plugins may not have screenshots at all. It all depends on how much work the creator of the plugin has put into updating this particular plugin download page. If you scroll to the right, you’ll be able to see some very important information about this plugin, but the most important things that you should notice is the compatibility of this particular plugin. So make sure that it is compatible up to the current WordPress blog version that you are using. And then you can also click to the author’s homepage and the plugin homepage, and if you feel like donating to this plugin, you can donate to the author via this link here. And at the bottom here, you can see the average rating of this plugin. So this particular plugin has slightly more than 4 out of 5 stars, based on 498 ratings. So that’s a good enough indication that this is a popular and widely used WordPress plugin. To download the plugin, just click on Download, and save this file to your computer.
Next, find the location where you have downloaded the plugins file on your computer or on your laptop, and then you need to extract this file. This file is in a Zip format, so if you’re using Windows, most versions of Windows, then you would have a Zip installation pre-installed when you install Windows itself. If you don’t have any Zip application, then you can go to WinZip.com and download the trial version of WinZip.
So I’m gonna extract this file here, and once the files have been extracted, you can click through into the folder, and you can see all the files that you’ll need to upload to your web hosting account.
So what you need to do is connect to your web hosting account using your FTP. You can use FileZilla, which you can do a Google search for FileZilla, it’s free, and it’s pretty good. So you can download and use FileZilla. Now, make sure that you double-click on wp-content folder on your web hosting account, and then click through to the plugins folder. And this is where you install all WordPress plugins. Before you upload any plugin, make sure that there are no nested folders. So for example, in that folder earlier, directly contains all the PHP files that are basically the codes needed to make this plugin work. Now, it should not contain another nested folder here other than the files directly part of the plugin. So make sure that there are no nested folders, and then just click on Upload.
Okay, so once all the files have been uploaded to your web hosting account, what you need to do next is log in to your WordPress blog. In your WordPress dashboard, just expand this plugins tab and click on Installed. Here, you’ll be able to see all the plugins that you have in your WordPress blog, including the plugin that we just uploaded called Google XML Sitemaps. So to activate this plugin, just click on the Activate Link. And it says here, “Plugin Activated†and this plugin is now ready to be used. Most plugins would create another link or another entry under Settings, and for example, the plugin that we just installed has created a new link here called XML Sitemap. To access that plugin’s features, I’ll just need to click on XML Sitemap.
And you can see here that this plugin is now ready for me to use. So that’s how you upload and install WordPress plugins manually to your WordPress blog.