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 forward we want
to search for the plugin, we'll do WPForms 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
WPforms 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 a plugin and
you've downloaded it from the plugin website you will 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 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 WPForms light activated you
can tell by the blue and these two are still not activated. From here you can
activate 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, we'll drag, we'll drill down into the public
HTML I need to go to wp-content that is where all of our themes and plugins are
kept. 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 OptinMonster 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, 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 installed
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 installed 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
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WordPress website and thanks for watching.