WordPress for Writers: Installing a WordPress Plugin on HostGator

The WordPress for Writers Series discusses how to install and maintain your own copy of WordPress. It is written for writers and subject matter experts, and does not assume any prior technical knowledge.

I’ve argued that online authors should use their own installations of WordPress. Administrating WordPress is easy if you use HostGator. Like many providers, HostGator drives its site hosting using an application called cPanel. After signing up for HostGator and registering your domain name, go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel, and you’ll have everything you need to install and maintain WordPress.

Installing WordPress is simple using the Fantastico De Luxe installation tool listed under the Software/Services tab. This will give you everything you need to set up your blog, give it a theme, and begin posting to the world.

Eventually, though, you’ll want to expand what your installation of WordPress can do by installing plugins. A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that extends WordPress with new features. The plugin architecture of WordPress permits thousands of developers around the world to add features to your blog without waiting for the WordPress developers to do it for them. By installing plugins, you can make your blog easier to use, and set it apart from the crowd.

In the following article, I’ll show you how to install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. This nifty extension improves your search engine results by generating a file used by Google and other engines to prioritize your site’s content. You can use the sitemap to instruct Google to give priority to your feature articles over your regular blog posts, or to highlight certain categories of blog posts over others. The steps provided below remain the same for any plugin. Once you install one, you’re free to upload new plugins to your heart’s content.

Note: While this article is specific to HostGator, it may work just as well on other service providers that use the cPanel interface. Emphasis on the “may.”

Upload The Plugin to WordPress

Plugins are downloaded from the Internet as a ZIP archive. This is a set of files compressed into a single file that ends in a .zip extension. Before you can use a plugin on your blog, you must upload it to your WordPress installation, extract it, and activate it. This section covers uploading and extracting the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

1. Download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from WordPress.org by right-clicking on the Download link and selecting Save As…. Firefox and Chrome on Windows should offer to save this file in your Downloads folder, which is hunky-dory.

2.  Navigate to http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel, where yourdomainname is the domain name you registered when signing up with HostGator. This will bring up HostGator’s cPanel interface for your domain.

3. Click on File Manager in the Files box.

4. On the left-hand side (the treeview), expand public_html. Expand wp-content underneath public_html. Select the plugins directory.

Your treeview should look like this. Unless you installed WordPress into a subdirectory, public_html is the location of your WordPress installation on your site. This is your WordPress root. All of your installed plugins will reside in the wp-content/plugins folder.

5. Click the Upload button in the File Manager toolbar (along the top of the browser).

6. Click the Choose File button, and select the .zip file for the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from its location on your computer’s hard drive. Wait until the upload box says 100% Complete, and then click the link that reads Back to /home/<username>/public_html/wp-content/plugins directory.

7. You should be back in File Manager. You’ve successfully uploaded the plugin, but WordPress can’t use it yet. You must uncompress the .zip file containing all of the plugin’s files. Click the checkbox next to the Google XML Sitemap .zip file. Then, select Extract from the File Manager toolbar. You’ll see a dialog box asking you where to extract the files. The default is the plugin directory, which is what you want, so just click Extract Files(s) on the dialog.

Congratulations – you’re done with File Manager! Now, it’s time to go into WordPress and activate the plugin.

Activating Your Plugin

A plugin isn’t running under WordPress until it’s been activated.

1. Go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin and log into your installation of WordPress.

2. Select Plugins from the left-hand menu.

3. Find Google XML Sitemaps in the list of plugins on the Plugins page, and click the Activate link.

You’re Done!

Google XML Sitemaps is now active. Play around with it by clicking XML-Sitemaps underneath the Settings menu on the left hand side of your WordPress administration panel. For guidance, read the Google XML Sitemaps FAQ page.

From here, you can repeat the process and install other popular plugins to round out your new WordPress installation, such as All-In-One SEO Pack to further improve your search engine results, or Facebook Connect for complete Facebook integration with your blog.