"Addons" are extra little programmes that run inside WoW, generally making Quality of Life changes to how your game works. Some addons will be pure flavour, others may help with a profession, or with questing, some might help with other parts of the game such as PvP or Raiding. Some people prefer to play WoW without addons at all, but there are certain addons, for certain parts of the game, that are almost considered as being required.
You can find addons on various websites that "host" large numbers of them, or on websites specifically for that addon, or a group of addons (perhaps written by the same authors).
Some of these sites include:
- Wowinterface - a mass addon repository
- Curseforge - a mass addon repository
- Tukui - website hosting two main addons and their various plugins
Once you have found an addon you're interested in, download and save it somewhere easy to find. Often they are downloaded in a compressed format, so you will need to extract them and place them in your addons folder, in your game folder.
Your addons are usually held in your World of Warcraft > _retail_ > Interface > Addons folder.
There is a full guide here: https://www.wowhead.com/addons-how-to-install-and-maintain
If you don't want to manually install addons, the alternative is to use an Addon Manager. These are programmes that will allow you to see and manage all of your addons in one place, will show you which ones have updates available, and allow you to update one or sometimes many, at the push of a button. Sometimes you have to tell them where your addon folder is - others will automatically detect all that information for you.
Our currently recommended addon manager is WoWUp. It is free to use, advert free and uses less space on your computer than many others.
You can download and install WoWUp here: https://wowup.io/
If you want to see more about addons, head over to the Useful Addons page.