Installing Themes And Plugins On Your WordPress Website
WordPress is an excellent way of building your presence online, with easy-to-use template designs and functionality opportunities in the way of plugins.
WordPress comes with great functionality that allows you to alter the appearance of your website in seconds with only minimal tweaking needed. There are many free themes that you are able to download and install straight from the WordPress interface.
The power of WordPress makes changes a simple process, however, everyone has to start somewhere and if it is all new to you, it is easy to get lost. Hopefully, this post will help you make the journey around your website that little bit easier, starting with Themes.
As mentioned above, a theme is like cladding to WordPress. It sits on top of the WordPress framework and brings design to the site. Each theme is different, with different options available. There are free themes and premium themes to use.
Free Themes
Often, a free theme will just be a ‘light’ version of a premium theme meaning that you have to buy the premium if you need it to do more things or remove a watermark in the footer for example. I would always recommend a premium theme as the cost is often well worth the functionality and ease of use, but if you are creating a simple website a free theme may be perfectly adequate to use.
Installing a free theme
To see the free themes, go to Appearance > Themes and have a look around! You can use the search bar to find specific themes that you may have researched, or just start scrolling through the catalogue.
If you like a theme and want to use it, it will need to be installed and activated. This is simple, just click on the theme you like and follow the instructions to install and activate.
You will need to then re-assign the menu into the correct place, depending on what the theme offers you. You can do this in Appearance > Menus, then tick the box where you want the menu to go.
Premium WordPress Themes
There are other themes that are ‘premium’ themes, that can be found across the various theme-selling websites such as Themeforest that you have to purchase to download. These themes do offer much more functionality than the free themes, as many of the free themes are ‘lite’ versions of a premium theme, with many features not available in the free version.
Upload premium themes
To upload a theme that you have bought from a 3rd party website, you go to Appearance > themes > Add new > Upload theme. You can see this option in the image above as a button next to the ‘Add Themes’ title.
The theme that you downloaded will be in your downloads folder as a .zip folder. You will need to double-click on this, or right-click > extract to open the folder up. Inside this will be a few more folders and files containing help documents and licenses as well as some more .zip files. These .zip files will have the name of the theme that you have downloaded. These are the ones that you will need to upload to your website.
Each theme you buy will have a help file that will guide you through how to install a theme, or an offer from the theme developers to install the theme for you.
Once you have uploaded the file successfully, simply activate the theme, assign a menu and your away!
Installing a Plugin
Plugins are essentially like apps for your phone. You add them to your website to improve functionality. Improve security? Get a plugin. Add SEO to your pages? Get a plugin. Need a contact form? Plugin!
Adding a plugin to your website is really simple, the difficult part is the research to know what to look for then the testing to make sure it is correct.
Installing a plugin is nearly identical to installing a theme. To install a free plugin from the plugin library, go to: Plugins > Add New and search for the plugin that you want.
Installing a premium plugin also works the same way as installing a premium theme. You go to Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin. Browse through your computer to find the downloaded plugin file, upload and activate it.
If you need help installing a Plugin or a Theme, feel free to get in touch with us using the form underneath. Alternatively, this may be a good excuse to book yourself into some WordPress Training where we can teach you how to do this and much more on your own website.
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