Installing, Activating, and Stopping WordPress Plugins Using SSH

How do you install and activate WordPress plugins?

At first, I naturally did it from the admin dashboard.

Here it is↓

But this is really tedious, isn’t it?

You have to search for plugins one by one, click the install button, wait, activate… It takes 10 seconds to get to the page, and 10 seconds to activate one plugin.

If you’re launching a new site and trying to activate about 20 plugins, it takes over 5 minutes. If you have multiple sites…

There’s a more efficient way.

That is uploading via “FTP”.

Installing Plugins Using FTP

Using software like FFFTP, upload plugins in bulk to /wp-content/plugins via FTP.

Plugins can be downloaded in zip format from the official WordPress plugin directory.

Then go to the admin dashboard, select all plugins, and activate them all at once.

The advantage is that you don’t need to do tedious manual work. The disadvantages are:

• You need to download packages in advance
• Uploading takes a long time
• Activation is manual

Many of you may already know this method.

But there’s an even more efficient way.

Installing/Activating/Stopping Plugins Using SSH

That is using SSH’s wp command.

With the wp command, you can:

• Work quickly
• Only need a shell script
• Activate/stop/delete freely

Here are examples of wp commands.

Install and activate plugins.

wp plugin install bottom-of-every-post
wp plugin install crayon-syntax-highlighter
wp plugin install markdown-on-save-improved
wp plugin install ps-auto-sitemap
wp plugin install pubsubhubbub
wp plugin install table-of-contents-plus
wp plugin install backwpup
wp plugin install wordpress-importer

wp plugin activate --all

You can also manipulate widgets.

# wp widget deactivate meta-2
# wp widget deactivate search-2
# wp widget deactivate recent-posts-2
# wp widget deactivate recent-comments-2
# wp widget deactivate archives-2
# wp widget deactivate categories-2

And create new posts.

wp post create --post_type=page --post_title="sitemap" --post_content='<!-- SITEMAP CONTENT REPLACE POINT -->'

If you’re a WordPress user, it’s worth learning how to use the wp command via SSH. Please master and utilize it.