Category: WordPress Tutorials

How to Add or Remove Plugins From Your WordPress Website

If you’re new to WordPress, or even if you’re not, knowing about plug-ins is a must.  WordPress is an amazingly powerful and simple platform.  It can make you a web pro in no time even without installing any extra plugins.  But to really shine and get your WordPress site performing at its best, you’ll eventually need to know about plugins. 

The basic purpose of a plugin is to extend the capabilities of your site.  They can also greatly simplify something that would be very difficult to do otherwise.  For example, let’s say you want to add a contact page to your WordPress site.  With a plugin, it’s as simple as clicking on install and the job is done.  If you had to do that with HTML or PHP programming it would take you much, much longer.  That’s assuming of course that you even knew how.

Since most of us don’t know how, plugins are a tremendous help.  They make it so we can concentrate on writing great content, or doing whatever we do best, rather than learning to be a programmer.

Since the purpose of this article is not to tell you about all the plugins that are available I won’t go into any detail about that.  I will say however, that there are thousands of them to choose from.  This is very fortunate for anyone that wants to use WordPress as their blogging or web platform. 

Not only are there thousands to choose from, but there are many of each type.  This is also of great benefit to us.  Sometimes one plugin may not play well with everything else we’ve got going on with our WordPress site.  A good example of this is the post editor I use on this site. 

I began with a plugin called Dean’s FCKEditor.  It is a full-featured and very good editor and many people use it without any problem.  On my site however, it behaved very erratically.  It even caused me to have two of the same input windows right on top of each other.  This was definitely not how the software was supposed to work.

So, since I was familiar with another editor plugin called TinyMCE Advanced, I thought I’d give that a try.  It worked perfectly.  This is not to say that Dean’s FCK is a bad editor at all.  I just tell you this to provide an example of why it’s a good thing that we have so many to choose from.   It makes it so you can choose your set of plugins that will make your WordPress site hum along beautifully.

Now that you know what plugins are and why you need them, let’s talk about how to install and delete them.   Go to your WordPress dashboard and look at the menu items down the left side.  Find the Plugins category and click on Add New as shown in the screen shot below.

(Click on screenshots to enlarge and open in new window for better viewing)

The Install Plugins screen will come up next as shown in the next screen shot. 

In this window you have several choices.  You can either click on one of the choices circled above or you can do a search.  Clicking on Popular brought up the following screen for me.  What comes up for you will depend on what’s popular at the time you do this.  If you want to search, you can either enter a term, or leave the box blank.  Leaving it blank will bring up all plugins.  Entering a term will narrow your search considerably.

Notice that the page already knows what’s installed.  So for me, since Contact form 7 is already installed, it says so. 

In this case, NextGEN Gallery is not installed.  If you click on Install Now, it will do just that.  It will ask if you’re sure and if you click yes, the installation will be instant. 

Clicking on details will give you a chance to read about it and make sure it’s what you want as shown in the screen shot below. 

Clicking on Install Now will do the same as on the previous screen.

Once you install, you get the following screen.  Click on Activate Plugin to activate it and make it usable.  This is a good place to mention something else.  You do not need to activate plug-ins that are installed on your site.  You can also deactivate (which I’ll show you in a moment) a plug-in that you don’t want to use. 

There are many reasons for not activating every plugin.  You may want to test several plugins to see which one you like.  Maybe one stops working but you think the next WordPress update might fix it.  Deactivating makes it so you don’t have to download and install again in the event you want to reactivate.  I still have Dean’s FCKEditor installed on mine.  I’m hoping someday it will work again with my setup.  If I delete the plugin rather than just deactivating, I’d need to download and install it again. 

Some plugins require you to adjust settings once activation is complete.  There are far too many to discuss in this article.  I just want you to be aware that it’s normal to have to do this. 

Once your plugin is installed and activated, it will look like this in your plugin list.  To edit the settings, click Edit.  To deactivate, click Deactivate.  Delete will only appear for plugins that are not active because they need to be deactivated before deleting.

To finish up let’s show you what deactivating and deleting looks like.  Click on Deactivate and now the plugin looks like this. 

You may also see the following screen shot at the top of the screen depending on what other plugins you have installed. If you do see it, be sure to follow the instructions.

If you want to delete, click the Delete button that now shows up.  The following screen appears.  The system gives you plenty of chances to change your mind or to get additional information.  If you want to see what exactly will be deleted, click on the Click to view entire list of files which will be deleted option at the bottom of the screenshot.

Click on Yes, Delete these files and data.  The plugin will be deleted and you will see any appropriate messages at the top of the screen.  As before, be sure to follow any instructions given there. 

So there you have it.  That’s the basics of installing and deleting plugins on your WordPress Website. 

One other thing I should mention here.  Some types of WordPress installations do not allow you to change the plugin or they only allow you to select from a few.  My first website was like this.  I took a course called the Ultimate Internet Boot Camp.  During that course, we actually installed and set up our WordPress websites and did our first blog post. 

The course was great, but I soon learned some things that I didn’t think were so great.  You only had a choice between a few plugins.  Most of the ones that were installed were done in such a way that you couldn’t even see what they were and they could not be removed. One of the worst parts to me was that you could not even install a backup plugin so you could back up your site. 

I believe the reason they did this was so you couldn’t back it up and install it someplace else.  They did not want to lose their rather inflated hosting fee.  To get my site off their servers and onto someplace else was quite a job.  It required copying and pasting every piece of information on my site to another site.  It was really worth it though.  Now I have all the freedom WordPress has to offer without any artificial restrictions. 

If you are taking a course like that and you want ultimate control over what you do with your site, I would recommend getting off their servers as fast as possible.  The longer you wait the more information you will have to move.

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Thanks for visiting!   

About Robert Seth

Robert Seth is a CPA in the Clark County, Washington area who has been serving individual and small business clients for the last 25 years. His business includes a growing number of remotely serviced customers throughout the United States. He’s also a writer and technology expert. He has a passion for improving the lives of others by helping them simplify the complicated stuff in their lives.

How to Add Videos, Photos, and Images to Your WordPress Website

Blogging with just written content can be very engaging to your readers and a great way to keep the conversation going.  There’s nothing like photos or video, though, to really bring the conversation to a new level.  Here’s how you put photos and videos on your WordPress Website.

This article will also be applicable to many other types of websites too.  Many website interfaces are very similar and use the same methods, or very similar ones to achieve the same tasks.  Hopefully, with some  slight modifications, you will be able to apply this information to your non-WordPress website too.

Before you can upload a video or photo to your website, it will need to be in an acceptable format.  Although this is really the subject of another article, let me take a moment to explain this.  Many video and photo cameras use proprietary formats for their videos and photos.   The RAW format that many high-end cameras can shoot in is an example of this.

Before these photos or videos can be used, they must be converted to a standard format that your website will understand and will be able to load quickly.  The most commonly supported formats for web photos and images are JPG, PNG, and GIFF.  You can tell if your image is in one of these formats by looking at the extension, or last three letters, in the file name.

For example, if I have a file named  myphoto  in JPEG format, it would look like myphoto.jpg.  Most modern digital cameras have shooting modes that will create this type of file in the first place.  This prevents having to do any conversions.

The standard formats for web video files are WMV, MOV, FLV, MPEG, and MPEG-4.  Again, it is best to get your video into one of these formats before attempting to upload it.

After you have your photo or video in an appropriate format, now it’s time to get it online.  There are basically two methods for doing this.  Which one you use depends on a couple of different factors.

First, let’s look at photos or images.  Since these should be of fairly small size, they’re ok to put on your own website.  To do this, open up the dashboard for your WordPress website as shown below.

The image uploader is circled in the screen shot above.  Click on this and the Media Library will open as shown below.

 

Click on Browse, find the file on your computer, and click on the file.  It will be added to the box next to browse in this screen shot.  Next click on Upload.

This screen shot is just the bottom portion of the screen that appears next.  Select the alignment and image size and then click on insert into post.  The image will be inserted wherever your cursor is on the post entry screen.  The size can also be adjusted by dragging the boundaries of the image once inserted into the post.

For inserting videos, there are two choices.  You can either put them on your site or host them on a site like YouTube or Vimeo.  It is generally not recommended to host videos on your WordPress site.  This is because the bandwidth of your site’s host could easily be exceeded if you have lots of visitors viewing your video at the same time.

If you do choose to host them on your site you will be limited to two megabytes.  To upload a video, you would use exactly the same process as for images with one exception.

Refer to the circled portion of the screen shot above.  That is the video uploader.  Simply click on that and proceed in the same way as you did for images.

For hosting videos on Vimeo or YouTube I will not go into how to get them on those sites in this article.  That will be the subject of future articles.  For now, you can go to either of those sites for instructions on how to use their sites.

For purposes of this article, we will look at how to get a YouTube video onto your site.  Most other video hosting sites will use a similar process.

Once you have your video on YouTube, go to the actual video and click on it as if you were going to view it.  The panel below the video, as shown in the screen shot above will appear.  Actually, only the part above Link to this video will show up at first.  Click on Share, and Embed, and the remaining part of the screen will appear.

If you just want to send your viewer to YouTube from your site, copy and paste the link in the Link to this video box.  If you want to embed the video in your site so the viewer stays on your site while viewing, copy and paste the code in the box below the Embed button.

Go back to your WordPress post that you’re working on as shown below.

If you just want to link to the video and send your viewers off to YouTube, Type in some text that you want to use as the link.  In this case I have used “Example of a link.”  Highlight it and click on the link button as shown above.  The hyperlink screen will open and you can then paste in the code that you copied off of YouTube from the Link to the video box.  It goes in the circled box as shown in the screen shot below

If you want to embed the video, which is recommended so viewers stay on your WordPress site, do the following.

WordPress icon bar

Click on the HTML tab.  This will show you the HTML of your post instead of the visual view.  Place your cursor where you want the video to show up.  I know the HTML looks a little alien but look carefully and you should be able to tell where you want the video to appear.  For simplicity, you might just want to insert it in the post before adding any text and leave it at the top of the post.  To insert it, paste the embed code you copied from the YouTube embed box.

Be sure to save anything you do in the HTML editor before going back to the visual editor.  On many platforms, if you don’t do this, your changes will be lost when you go back to the visual editor.  Even if you’re just adding HTML tags to adjust the positioning, be sure to save first before going back to visual.  Do this by clicking Save Draft, Publish, or Update.

When you go back to the visual tab, the video will appear as a blank box.  This is how it should look.   The video will appear normal when the post is viewed by your visitors.

So there you have it.  As you can see, it’s pretty easy to add images, photos, and video to your WordPress website.  Your viewers will appreciate having some video and pictures to look at instead of just text.

So now it’s your turn.  How did you like this article?  Are there other subjects you’d like to read about?  If so, leave a comment.  We’d love to hear from you!  Also, feel free to join us on Facebook by clicking the “like” button in the “Find us on Facebook box” in the left sidebar

Thanks for visiting.

About Robert Seth

Robert Seth is a CPA in the Clark County, Washington area who has been serving individual and small business clients for the last 25 years. His business includes a growing number of remotely serviced customers throughout the United States. He’s also a writer and technology expert. He has a passion for improving the lives of others by helping them simplify the complicated stuff in their lives.