How Do I Activate Pro Features? Installing and Licensing DocxToWP Pro

A customer wrote in last week. He had bought Pro, installed the plugin, and could not find anywhere to type his activation code. He went looking in the plugin's settings. He clicked the Upgrade item in the menu and got a page listing Pro features with a buy button on it. He had already bought it.

Then he wrote in a second time, because he had found another email, followed it to the settings screen, and still could not see a licence field.

He had done nothing wrong. The answer is a single sentence that was written nowhere he looked, so here it is:

Pro is a separate plugin, not a key that unlocks the free one.

If that is the sentence you needed, you can stop reading and go install the .zip from your purchase email. The rest of this is the detail.

Why there is no licence box in the free plugin

Most WordPress plugins with a paid tier ship one plugin. You install it, you buy a key, you paste the key in, and the greyed-out features light up. That is the model nearly everyone has in their head, and it is a reasonable thing to expect.

DocxToWP does not work that way, for a reason that is worth a paragraph.

The free plugin is called DocxToPost and it lives in the WordPress.org plugin directory. The directory's guidelines are strict about this: you may advertise a paid version, but you may not ship the paid functionality locked behind a key. A bulk import screen that exists, looks finished, and refuses to run until you pay is exactly what is not allowed.

So the bulk importer is not in the free plugin at all. Not disabled, not hidden, not there. And a licence key that unlocked nothing would be a text box that does nothing, which is worse than no text box at all.

DocxToWP Pro is separate software, downloaded from us rather than from the directory, with the bulk importer, drip publishing and SEO automation actually inside it. That is where the licence box is, because that is where there is something to license.

The naming does not help, and that part is our fault. WordPress rejected "DocxToWP" as a display name for the directory listing, so the free plugin was renamed to DocxToPost while the URL slug stayed docxtowp. Two similar names for two different plugins is a confusing thing to hand somebody at the exact moment they are trying to find a text box.

The four steps

1. Download the Pro plugin

The download link is in your purchase email, and docxtowp.com/download always serves the current version. You will get a file called docxtowp-pro.zip. Leave it zipped. WordPress wants the .zip.

If your reaction to that link is "this is the plugin I already have", that is the misunderstanding at work. It is a different plugin. Download it.

2. Deactivate the free plugin

Go to Plugins and deactivate DocxToPost.

This step matters more than it looks. Both plugins register the same admin menu, so if both are active, one of them disappears from your sidebar, and it is usually not the one you were hoping to see. People who skip this step install Pro successfully and then cannot find it.

You can leave the free plugin installed and deactivated, or delete it entirely. Posts you have already imported are ordinary WordPress posts. Nothing here touches them.

3. Upload and activate Pro

Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, choose the .zip, then Install Now and Activate.

Your sidebar entry now reads DocxToWP Pro. That is how you know you are in the right plugin.

4. Enter your licence key

Go to DocxToWP Pro → Licence, paste your key, and click Activate.

The screen then confirms what the licence actually covers: your plan, how many sites it allows, and when it renews. A lifetime licence says so and has nothing to renew.

Your key arrives in a separate email from Dodo Payments, who process the payment for us. Our email has the download link; theirs has the key. Two emails, two different things, and if you have only found one of them that is probably the problem. Search your inbox for Dodo Payments and check your spam folder.

When the key will not take

Nearly every failed activation is one of three things.

You are in the wrong plugin. Check the sidebar. If it says DocxToPost, Pro is not installed yet and you are hunting for a screen that does not exist there.

You pasted the wrong value. The licence key, not the order number or the invoice number. Check for a space that came along with the copy, at either end.

The licence is already in use. Each licence covers a set number of sites. If you have used it on a staging site, a client site or an old domain, open DocxToWP Pro → Licence there and click Deactivate to free it up. You can move a licence as many times as you like.

If none of those is it, email support@docxtowp.com. Inside the plugin, DocxToWP Pro → Help & Support has a system report. Paste it into the email. It answers the first three questions I would otherwise have to ask, which usually turns two days of back-and-forth into one reply.

What changed because of that support thread

Writing this post was not the whole fix. A documentation page is only read by people who go looking for documentation, and the person in that thread was looking inside WordPress, where the problem was.

So, in the plugins themselves:

• Pro has a dedicated Licence menu item. The licence box used to be the fourth section of a ten-section Settings page, below image optimisation settings. That is a fine place for a setting and a bad place for the one control a new customer needs in their first five minutes. It is now its own entry, named the word people scan the menu for.
• The free plugin's Upgrade screen now answers buyers. Above the feature list, before the pitch, there is now an "Already bought Pro? Start here" block with the four steps in it. That screen is where the customer in that thread ended up, and it previously had nothing on it addressed to someone who had already paid.
• The purchase email says it outright. It used to say "install it, then enter your key at DocxToWP Pro → Licence", which is accurate and assumes you know Pro is a separate download. It now says so in as many words.
• The Licence screen answers the three failure cases itself, rather than letting you leave the page to find out.

If you hit a wall somewhere in this plugin, it is worth telling me. It is hard to see your own software the way a person seeing it for the first time does, and the fastest way to find out where it is confusing is for someone to say so. This whole set of changes exists because one person wrote in twice instead of giving up.

In short

Pro is a separate plugin. Download it, deactivate the free one, install the .zip, then paste your key at DocxToWP Pro → Licence. The full version of this, with the troubleshooting, is at How to activate DocxToWP Pro.