World of Warcraft addons can really greatly help improve your game play but can sometimes be a pain in order to install and get working properly. Here I will walk you step by step showing you how to install WoW addons. Also note that I will show a specific addon to install but you install all of them the same way.

There are several places that you can go to download WoW addons and while I'm not going to go over them one by one a nice short list of places is included below that I use.

This step is pretty easy. If you are reading this I'm sure you have already identified which addon(s) that you want to get and using the above links I'm sure you have already downloaded them. If not, just go through and download the zipped file for the addon you want. Those 2 sites listed above make it easy to find and download the zip files, which contain the addon.

For this part I'm going to assume you downloaded the file to your desktop. The first thing you should always do after downloading something from the internet is to run your virus scan software to insure there are no virus/keyloggers hiding in the zip file.

Now we are ready to unzip or extract the files. In this example I use Winzip to extract the files but you can use whatever program you wish to unzip the files. For Winzip, just right-click on the addon file and choose "Extract To <Filename>".

After a few seconds after extracting it will be finished and a new folder is created with the same name as the zip file that we started with.

Now we are ready to move the addon files that we extracted to the proper location in the World of Warcraft directory. First we must copy all the files in the folder that was just created. We do this by holding Shift then clicking on the first folder and then while still holding Shift we click on the last folder which highlights all of them. Next right-click and select "Copy".

Next, you want to navigate to your World of Warcraft addons folder, which is usually in "C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns\" assuming you selected the default location when you installed WoW. Now we just right-click and select "Paste" and that will paste in the Addon files that we copied earlier.

There we go! We have successfully put the addon files in the right place. For a lot of people this is where 99% of the problems that come up are because they didn't put them in the proper place.

Now we just have to load up World of Warcraft and check on the character selection screen to make sure our addon is there and not out of date. On a side note, an addon usually becomes "Out of Date" whenever a new patch is introduced in the game. If you just downloaded the addon files from the places listed above you will not have this problem.

After you start up WoW on your character selection screen you should see a button that says "Addons" in the bottom left corner.

Now, click the button that says "Addons" and it will bring up the addon menu. The menu allows you to manage all the addons you have installed. You can turn addons on or off for specific characters and you can even load out of date addons if you want.

As you can see I have quite a few addons installed and after you get the hang of installing them yourself you probably will to. I hope this really has helped you out a whole lot. If you would like to see a video of this process put together check out the video below and don't forget to leave comments or suggestions.