How to Activate a WordPress Plugin

While a standard WordPress website provides you with the ability to display information on your domain, you may eventually decide that you want additional feature or functionality that you can’t get with the default options.

Many of the more exciting and useful things that you can do on your site are accomplished with the help of plugins. These can be downloaded from the WordPress repository and installed on your site, directly from the Plugins tab in your admin section. But after you have installed a plugin, you will need to activate that plugin to be able to use it.

Activating a WordPress Plugin

The steps in this guide were performed in WordPress 5.1, but are very similar in most earlier versions of the application as well. Note that some Web hosting companies might block certain plugins, which may make it impossible for you to activate them. If you encounter a situation like this you will need to contact your hosting company foe further information.

Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your site at yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

Step 2: Hover over the Plugins option at the left side of the window, then choose the Installed Plugins option.

Step 3: Click the Activate link under the plugin that you wish to activate.

If you discover after activating a plugin that you no longer wish to use it, then you will need to deactivate that plugin. The process is very similar to how we activated that plugin in the steps above.