Tutorial on Installing a WordPress Plugin

Posted in Tutorials

For the purpose of this tutorial, we will install a very useful plugin called “BackUpWordPress” by Human Made Limited.  Here is the link to the BackUpWordPress plugin in the WordPress Plugin directory.  It is always good to get plugins from the official WordPress Plugin directory because the plugins are listed there are plugins that have been vetted and conforms to certain coding standards.  Plus you can see the rating of the plugin as well as how popular it is.

1. Once you found a plugin either through Google or through the search of WordPress Plugin directory, note the exact name of the plugin as stated in the WordPress Plugin directory.   Although you can, you do not need to download the plugin from the directory.

2. Instead, log into your WordPress admin and to go “Plugins -> Add New” …

3. If you had downloaded the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory, then you can click the “Upload” link (as shown above) and upload the zip file and click “Install Now”.

4. If you had not downloaded the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory, Enter  the name of the plugin (the same name noted in the Plugin directory) in the search field.   There are many backup plugins out there.  To confirm that you got the right one, you can match the version number as shown in the plugin search results with the version in the WordPress plugin directory.  In this tutorial, we are installing version 2.4.3 of the BackUpWordPress plugin.

5.  Click the “Install Now” link for that plugin.

6.  It will prompt you to confirm that you really want to install this plugin.  Say yes.

7.  As seen below, WordPress will get the plugin from downloads.wordpress.org (good to check that its download from here).  It then unpacks and install the plugin.

8.  An installed plugin is not active and does not have any effect.  You have to activate the plugin in order for it to be of any use.  You need to explicitly click the “Activate Plugin” in order to activate the plugin.  When you click on this link, it will activate the plugin and take you to the Plugin page where the plugin is listed…

You can tell that the plugin is activated because it is highlighted in a different color and shows the “Deactivate” link, which you would click if you ever want to deactivate the plugin.  And deactivated plugin would show an “Activate” link, which is what you would click to activate the plugin had you not activated it previously in the plugin installation page.

That’s it.  That’s how to install the a WordPress plugin.

Some Notes about the BackUpWordPress Plugin

Each plugin has it own instructions.  For this plugin, it says “Find me under “Tools -> Backup”.  So that is where you would go to perform backups and make setting changes.

Note that this plugin has a default backup schedule setup once it is activated.   The default backup schedule is daily backup of your database.  If you don’t want automatic backups and rather use it for manual backups whenever you want to, change it by going to “Tools -> Backup” menu in your WordPress Dashboard and then click the “Settings” link shown…

If for some reason you get a page looking like this after clicking the Settings link …

It means the page didn’t load properly.

You should go back to the WordPress Dashboard home, by changing the URL in your browser to /wp-admin …

And then go to menu “Tools -> Backup” and click the settings link again.  The second time it loads correctly and you should see something like this …

To turn off automatic backup, I set the schedule to manual.  And I set the backup for “Both Database & Files”.  Don’t forget to click the blue Update button.

To learn more about using this plugin to perform backup, read the tutorial on How to Backup WordPress.

If you ever want to uninstall a WordPress plugin, read this tutorial.

 

 

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