How To Install Plugins

When you go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, you will find currently over 10,000 plugins that add additional functions to the basic WordPress script. There is a plugin for almost anything you can imagine to do with your website: you can add contact forms, photo galleries, video players, or transform your website into a forum, shopping-cart or auction website, directory, and much more.

In the following we want to show you how to install the Google XML sitemap plugin. After you know how to install and use this plugin, you will find it easy to add any plugins you would like to add to your website. You can easily try out any plugin that sounds interesting to you, and remove it later if you don’t like it

We also recommend that you install a few very useful SEO plugins that may help your website get better positions in the search engines. We will describe how to do this in our tutorial ‘How To SEO’.

Now let’s install the Google sitemap. A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages of your website that you want to be indexed in the search engines. This plugin will not only create the sitemap for you but also let Google and the other search engines know which pages of your website you want to be visited by their bots and in which intervals.

In the left dashboard menu, click on ‘Plugins’:

You will see a list of the plugins that are installed by default: ‘Akismet’ and ‘Hello Dolly’. While you can safely delete ‘Hello Dolly’, Akismet is the WordPress spam filter and is very important if you intend to enable your website visitors to leave comments, e.g. if you are setting up a blog. If you disable website comments, you won’t need Akismet and can delete it as well. If you however set up a blog, we highly recommend that you ‘enable’ Akismet, and follow the links to get your ‘Akismet key’.

Now let’s install the Google sitemap plugin. Click on the ‘add new’ button on top, and type ‘Google XML sitemaps‘ as search term, and hit the search button:

The plugin with the name ‘Google XML Sitemaps’ should come up first. Click on ‘install now’:

In the next screen click on ‘activate’:

Once it’s installed, click on ‘settings’:

Leave all settings on top as they are, but look for the one called ‘Notify YAHOO about updates of your Blog‘ and click on ‘Request one here’. You will be forwarded to the Yahoo website. If you don’t have a Yahoo account yet, you will need to open one. Then walk through the process to request your Yahoo API key. What you enter in the form is not really important. At the end you will receive your Yahoo API key that will be a long combination of letters and numbers. Copy this key (mark it with your mouse, right click on it and select ‘copy’, than go back to your plugin settings, right-click in the field and select ‘paste’. Make sure to check the box:

Then scroll down to select the intervals you want the search engines to visit your website. The following settings are recommended:

• Post Priority: Do not use automatic priority calculation
• Sitemap content: check everything
• Change frequencies: set ‘author pages’ and ‘older archives’ to monthly, everything else to ‘weekly’ (unless you plan to have a blog and really will update it daily)
• Set Priorities according to the following table:

Click ‘update’ options.

If you want to add more cool features to your website, here are some plugins we recommend:

• Contact form: ‘Contact form 7‘ and ‘Really Simple Captcha‘
• Photo gallery: NextGEN Gallery
• Search engine optimization: All in One SEO Pack (read also our search engine optimization tips for more valuable tips on how to make your website show on Google)

You can browse many more free plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

Tutorial 'How To Make Your Own Website':

1. Lesson 1 – Overview: What Will You Learn In This Web Design Tutorial?
2. Lesson 2 – What Will I Need To Build My Website?
3. Lesson 3 – Naming Your Website: Find And Buy The Best Domain Name
4. Lesson 4 – Your Website Needs A Home: Getting Your Web Hosting Account
5. Lesson 5 – Connecting Your Domain Name And Hosting Account: Set Your Nameservers
6. Lesson 6 – Installing WordPress: The Famous 3 Minutes Set Up Of Your Website
7. Lesson 7 – Optimizing Your Settings: Update And Get Ready For Google
8. This article: Lesson 8 – Installing Plugins: Add More Functions
9. Lesson 9 – Make It Yours: Selecting Your Website’s Template
10. Lesson 10 – Adding Content: Posts, Pages, Menu, Sidebar

Related posts:

• Lesson 7 – Optimizing Your Settings: Update And Get Ready For Google
• Lesson 6 – Installing WordPress: The Famous 3 Minutes Set Up Of Your Website
• Lesson 1 – Overview: What Will You Learn In This Web Design Tutorial?