WordPress Plugins And Their Ways Of Installation

WordPress Plugins And Their Ways Of Installation

What is a WordPress Plugin?

WordPress plugins are essential for customizing your website without editing code. They add all kinds of features that would make your website more dynamic and functional. For enhancing SEO to improving security, plugins can transform your site in many ways. WordPress plugins are apps that enable you to add new features and functionality to your WordPress website. In other words, they work the same way as apps for your smartphone.

Plugins allow almost anyone to add new features to the core WordPress platform. A plugin, also known as a module or extension, is a piece of software that enhances your website with new capabilities. Developers and designers adore WordPress because of its strength and adaptability. Another crucial component of the workflow is plugins. Additionally, there are hundreds or thousands of these plugins because WordPress is open-source.

How to Install a WordPress Plugin

1. How To Install WordPress Plugins via Dashboard

Installing WordPress plugin from within your dashboard is one of the easiest ways to get a plugin up and running fast. What you need to do is under the plugins section of your WordPress dashboard click on “Add new.” You can then search for the plugin you want to install. type Yoast SEO. You can also browse the featured, popular, and recommended plugins. Then click on “Install Now.” Then click on “Activate.”

2. How To Install WordPress Plugins via SFTP

The second way to install WordPress plugins is to do it manually via SFTP (secure FTP). For example, use the free Filezilla FTP client to upload the Yoast SEO plugin to the WordPress website. Go to the WordPress repository and manually download the plugin. You can search for the plugin and then click into it. Then click on the “Download Version xx” button. This will download the latest .zip version of the plugin to your computer. Unzip the plugin and then, via your FTP client, upload the plugin to your/public/wpcontent/plugins directory. Then, to activate the plugin, go to “Installed Plugins” under the plugin section in your WordPress dashboard and click on “Activate” under the plugin you just uploaded via SFTP.

3. How To Install WordPress Plugins via WP-CLI

This is the third and final way to upload a plugin to WordPress in which WP-CLI is a command line tool for managing WordPress. Check out the more in-depth guide on using WP-CLI to get it installed. Once WP-CLI launched, you can run the commands to install a plugin. First though, you will need to know the name. The name of the plugin you use for WP-CLI is simply the folder name in the repository or Git. So in this example, it is “wordpress-seo.”

As you can see WP-CLI is pretty fast and, once you get used to it, can be a great way to manage your WordPress installations, plugins, and installs. Make sure to also check out the official WP-CLI documentation for additional commands and examples.

Some of the WordPress Plugins for making your site mobile-friendly

1. WPTouch

WPTouch is a mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically adds a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website. Recommended by Google, it will instantly enable a mobile-friendly version of your website that passes the Google Mobile test, and ensure your SEO rankings do not drop due to not having a mobile-friendly website.

A WordPress plugin that Google recommends is a must-have for your website, and WPTouch is one such plugin that makes your WordPress website fit any screen. It doesn’t change your original WordPress desktop site or content but simply optimizes it for different screens.

2. JetPack

Jetpack is an all-in-one WordPress plugin with multiple features that help improve your WordPress site’s security, enhance marketing, give you SEO analytics, improve performance, and offer design tools. Jetpack updates its software monthly to ensure its features are compatible with other WordPress plugins. It has over 5 million downloads, works with WP and PHP version 5.6 and higher, and has over 44 languages available.

Jetpack WordPress plugin helps you create better content, grow your subscribers, earn money from your website and keep it safe, fast, and secure. You can grow and keep track of your website traffic with Jetpack stats, and create better content with Jetpack AI.

3. Smush

Smush is a WordPress image optimization plugin that allows you to compress your images from the dashboard of your website without loss of quality that is visible to the naked eye. Its main benefit lies in improving the loading time of your pages. With 1M+ active installations, it is one of the most popular plugins for optimizing images in the official directory.

An informative and attractive website features multiple engaging images to enhance user experience and increase conversion rate. Unfortunately, images can eat up space and affect your website’s speed. Smush is an award-winning image compression and optimization plugin for WP. Other Smush features include locating and notifying you of images slowing down your site, allowing you to set your preferred maximum image width and height, optimizing images not in your media library, and drag & drop option for specific images for resizing.

4. WP Mobile Menu

WP Mobile Menu is the perfect WordPress plugin that tactfully adds a three-layered mobile menu to all WordPress sites. No coding is required: Just install, activate, and customize to your standard.

WP Mobile Menu is an easy-to-use WordPress mobile menu plugin that keeps your mobile visitors engaged, providing them easy access to your site content. Some of the features include text & logo branding, several display layouts, background images for menus, customizing styling, and a three-deep menu level. WP Mobile Menu has three premium versions with more menu options for your professional, business, and enterprise needs.