When I first started making wordpress blogs one of the first things that I would do is to go and search for and download every plugin through the plugin search function of wordpress. This is a lengthy process and was something that I didn’t look forward to doing as it was very monotonous. Finally I found a solution to this problem.

An FTP client is a program that you download onto your computer and it allows you to directly login to your hosting accounts system and upload as many files and folders as you want at a time. I’ve known about this for a while but always had trouble setting one up. Once I actually put effort into it, it was quite easy to set up.

The one that I personally use is called File Zilla. This is a very straight forward and very easy to use FTP Client, and best of all it is free!

When you get File Zilla you’re going to see this at the top, prompting you for your server and login information:

This is the only complicated part, because of how variable the information is that you can get.  What I did was go onto my hosts website and go to the help section.  There I searched for FTP client information and it popped up right away.

Once you have been able to log in you’re going to want to have a folder on your computer full of all the plugins that you want to have on all your different websites.  I have a standard of about 7 or 8 that I’ll use on every website.  On the left side will be the view window for the files on your own computer, while the right side will be the view window for the files on the hosts server.  This is what mine looks like:

This is the path on the hosts server for where you’ll want to dump all your plugins

  • www –> SITENAME.COM –> wp-content –> plugins

Select all your plugins on the left at once, right click, and click on ‘Add Files to Queue’.  This will then send your files that you want to transfer over to your blog to a queue.  Now that they’re in the queue, look at the top toolbar and hit the ‘Toggles processing of the transfer queue’ button, and all your files will be transferred over at once!

Now login to your WordPress control panel and head to the plugins section.  Hit the box by the plugin heading on the page, and go to the Bulk Actions drop down box and select Activate.  Then press Apply.

You’ve now uploaded every plugin that you use in a very effecient and effective manner and saves you from the drudge of finding every single one and activating it.  Even if your plugins are outdated WordPress now has an updates option on the Dashboard drop down box of the wordpress toolbar in which you can update every plugin all at once, again saving you a lot of time.

Filed under: Plugins

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