Are you looking to find out the way to use FTP to upload files on your WordPress website? FTP or file transfer protocol may be a fast and straightforward thanks to upload files from your computer to your website. In this article, we’ll show you ways to use FTP to upload files to WordPress.
What is FTP?
FTP is short for File transfer protocol. It allows you to transfer files from your computer to your website hosting account.
Now you would possibly be thinking there’s already a media uploader inside the WordPress admin area for uploading files like images, video, audio, PDF and more.
Why do you need FTP?
You need FTP to be ready to manually upload files in WordPress that sometimes won’t work thanks to a mistake on your site.
Normally, you don’t need FTP to upload files in the least . You can easily upload images from WordPress admin area. You can even upload plugins and themes from WordPress itself.
However, sometimes you’ll got to upload a plugin or theme file manually for WordPress troubleshooting purposes and fixing commonest WordPress errors.
Using FTP to Upload WordPress Files
First, you’ll got to download and install a FTP client on your computer. FTP client is an app that helps you hook up with your website and transfer files using the FTP protocol.
Here are a number of the foremost popular FTP clients that you simply can install.
- FileZilla (Windows, Mac, Linux | Free)
- WinSCP (Windows | Free)
- Cyberduck (Mac | Free)
For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll be using FileZilla. You can use the other FTP client that you simply like. The basic concepts are the same regardless of the software you use.
Connecting To Your WordPress Site Using FTP
When you open your FTP software, it’ll ask you to attach to your website using your FTP login credentials.
Your FTP login credentials are sent to you via email once you check in for your WordPress hosting account. You can also find your FTP account information in your hosting account’s cPanel dashboard.
If you cannot find the login credentials, then you can contact your hosting provider to get this information.
Once you have the login information, you need to open FileZilla and then go to File » Site Manager.
This will bring up a pop up window where you can add your website information. Click on the ‘New Site’ button and provide a title for your website.
In the next column, you’ll be asked to enter your host. This is usually your domain name.
Note: within the protocol section, you ought to select SFTP if your hosting provider supports it.
Under the logon type field, select ‘Normal’ then enter your FTP username and password.
Now you can click on the connect button to continue. FileZilla will save your website settings for future logins and open a replacement FTP connection to your website.
If this is often your first time connecting to your website from this computer, then FileZilla may show you a certificate popup.
Check the box next to ‘Always trust certificate for future sessions’ and click on on the OK button to continue.
FileZilla will now plan to login to your website using the credentials you entered. Once connected, you’ll see the list of files and folders on your website under the ‘Remote site’ column.
The remote site column displays files and folders on your website and therefore the ‘Local site’ section shows files on your computer.
You can browse Local site to locate the files on your computer that you simply want to upload to your website. Next, you would like to right-click the file and choose to upload from the menu.
FileZilla will now transfer the file from your computer to your WordPress site.
However, WordPress needs certain files and folders in specific locations to figure properly. This means you can’t just upload a file anywhere. You need to know where to upload a file in your WordPress site.
For example, if you would like to manually upload a plugin to your WordPress website. Then first you will need to download the plugin to your computer.
After that, you’ll get to unzip the plugin file. Inside the zip file, you’ll find the plugin folder. WordPress looks for plugins in the /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
You will first get to attend /wp-content/plugins/ folder within the Remote site column. After that, you’ll upload the plugin folder from your computer to your website.
Once you have uploaded the plugin, you need to visit the plugins page inside your WordPress admin area to activate the plugin.
Similarly, if you wanted to upload a premium theme to your website, you’ll first download and unzip the theme folder on your computer. After that, you’ll upload it to /wp-content/themes/ folder on your website.
FTP isn’t just wont to upload files from your computer to your WordPress website. It also can be wont to download files from your website and edit them.
Simply right-click on the files or folders you would like to download under the ‘Remote Site’ column and click on on the download button.
Also you can use FTP to backup all WordPress files. Simply select all files and folders and download them to your computer.
However, this is often just the backup of your WordPress files, and it doesn’t include your content (Database). If you would like to backup content also, then you’ll do so by creating a manual backup of your WordPress database.
We hope this text helped you find out how to use FTP to upload files to WordPress. You may also want to ascertain our step by step WordPress security guide for beginners.
