You can manually upload a plug-in or automatically through the WordPress admin dashboard. First this article will cover the manual way because not all plug-ins are available through the WordPress admin dashboard for automatic upload.
To begin you must first download a plug-in of your choice. There are a number of resources to download a plug-in from. For example you can search for the type of plug-in you want in a search engine or you can go to https://wordpress.org/plugins.
Also you can go to our downloads page and visit the library of some of our favorite WordPress plug-ins. Once there take a look at the plug-ins. See which one interests you. Once you made a decision simply click on it and it will begin to automatically download to your downloads folder on your computer. This process usually begins within a few seconds and takes only about 20 seconds to fully download.
No matter where you download from a zip file of the plug-in should be downloaded to your computer. Take note of where the file was downloaded onto your computer.
Now go to your WordPress dashboard. Hover over Plugins on the left-hand side navigation. On the submenu click on Add New. This brings you to the WordPress Plugin page for uploading plug-ins manually and automatically. Up top click on the Upload Plugin button. Finally navigate to where the downloaded plug-in is located on your computer and select it for downloading.
To automatically upload a plug-in just scroll down on the plug-ins page and you'll see a selection of plug-ins to choose from. You can also search for plug-ins in the search bar. Although searching for plug-ins in the search bar might not provide results as good as WordPress.org or a search engine.
Author: Jesse Lange