When a new plugin is developed by some company, they usually provide as many conveniences and features as they can to satisfy their users in order to obtain more market share. And as the number of users grows day by day, the developers will also update their plugins version by version. And they cut some features as they update their plugin and users need to pay for the pro version to get these features.

That is normal because developers need to make money from their plugins. Therefore, sometimes it’s good for you to keep the old version plugin working on your WordPress site. And sometimes when you need these old versions of plugins to install on your new website, you can’t download them from the developer’s official site and WordPress plugin directory, because all you get is the new versions. In this case, you need to extract the installed old-version plugins from your old WordPress site.

How to extract plugins from your WordPress site?

1. Go to the file manager of your website from the hosting server.

If your website is hosted by shared hosting, go to the cPanel dashboard or the dashboard provided by your hosting company.

Here we take cPanel as an example. go to the file manager, check the directory  /xxxx.com(your domain)/wp-content/plugins

2. Go to the website you want to extract the plugins from, Go to wp-content.

3. Go to plugins

4. Right-click on the plugin you want to extract and click compress.

5. Click zip archive when compressing the plugin.

6. After the plugin compressed, right-click the zip file and download it. Now you have successfully extracted the plugin from your site.

When you extract the plugin from your site, it’s in a zip file format which is the same as the developer provides on their official website. You can upload it to your new website by adding new plugins. You can install it the way all other plugins have been installed.