Do you want to know how to access your website via FTP?
Well keep watching, in this video I'll walk you through two popular
ways that you can use FTP with your
WordPress website. Since you'll be making changes to your website
make sure you have a backup copy of your website first.
Now, FTP is a file transfer protocol and
that allows you to access files and folders
on your website through your hosting provider.
This is a way that you can access your website without going
through your WordPress dashboard. This comes in handy if
a plugin goes awry or if a bit of
code breaks your site you have another way to access your website,
clean it up, and get back up and running quickly.
There are several FTP clients that you can use,
for this video I'll be using Filezilla
so you want to head over to Filezilla-project.org
and download the one appropriate for your
machine. Once you install Filezilla this is what
it will look like. The next thing we want to do is go
ahead and add the credentials to
access our website. So let's head over to File
Site Manager, from here we can add
a new site. Under Host you want to
add your website name, your FTP credentials
should have come to you from your hosting provider via
email or you can also email your hosting provider
and ask them for the credentials if you don't know them already.
Under protocol we'll choose FTP
the encryption we want to use explicit FTP over
TLS if available. That means that it is
encrypting the data that is coming from our computer to our
website so we want to keep that.
For login type we want to use
normal. Next go ahead and add the credentials for
your user for the FTP. Finally we can
rename this and that helps if you have multiple sites.
Now I'm gonna click connect, once it connects
you'll see a successful dialog up here
you'll also see all of your folders coming over
over here. If you're getting an FTP connection issue
say an impossible to establish a connection to the server
then take a look at your credentials
there's something wrong with your credentials
and ask your hosting provider if you have the correct
information. Now let's take a look at the
FTP area.
Over on the left is our local site and this a folder
on my computer where I can
upload and download files
and again this is on my computer. Over on the right is the
remote site and you should see your
wp folders and files here
if you see something like public.
If you see something like public_html
then you're one folder above where you
should be so go ahead and click into that and try and
get to the folder where you have all of your WordPress
files and folders. From here we can upload and
download files that we need to. For instance
I'm going to change my
theme's functions file
so I want to double click into my wp-content
into my themes area
into my themes folder, I know which one it is
and here's my functions.php
I can right click on that and download that
and as you see over here it's coming locally to my
computer. So now I have a file
locally on my computer from my
WordPress website. Now that it's downloaded I can open this up
with a text editor. I'm gonna use Notepad
and I can make any changes that I need to
to that file, then once you make the changes
you can save it, go back
to the functions area, upload
overwrite it and now you've made changes
to your website from your FTP. Now what if
you want to upload a plugin to your website and
not do it through the admin area. That's pretty popular
to do if you've downloaded a premium plugin
from the plugin's website and you
download it to your computer and now you need a way to upload it to
your website but you don't want to use the WordPress
admin area. What we can do is you see this
folder with three dots, if I double click on that,
that will take me up through the folder
hierarchy to the next level.
So I need to do that again until I see
my plugins area
and double click on the plugins and now I can
upload from the left to the right.
I'm gonna go grab a plugin so I can show you how this looks.
Now I've downloaded this premium plugin
and what we can do first is we want to make sure that we extract
the .zip file locally
so I'm gonna extract it. I want to tell it where
I want to put it and
I'm gonna put it in the main folder
and extract. Then we see a new folder in our
directory just double click and make sure that all of the files are
there. That looks good, so now we can upload
this to our website from the
FTP. I'm gonna go back to my Filezilla
you see it seems like there are things that are missing
it's okay, you can go up here and click refresh
the file/folder and that'll bring in
all the information. So I'm ready to upload
I want to make sure that on the left I have the folder
that I want to upload and on the right I want to make sure that I'm in
my plugins directory like you see here. You could
left click and drag however I've
noticed that there can be many times that you'll accedentally
drop it in a different directory and you
might lose where it's at. So a better idea
is just to right click and click
upload. It'll take a little while for the files to
upload directly into our plugin directory
and you can watch the queue go down from here
as well as the successful transfers right there.
Now that it's finished uploading we can head over to
our dashboard to see the plugin.
I'm gonna go to my dashboard,
head over to the plugins area, installed plugins
and you see the MonsterInsights is in fact
over but when we upload via
FTP it'll come over but it will not be active
and that works out really well in case there's something we need to do before we activate it.
Now if you want to add all of your media through
the FTP you'll first want to make sure that you add a plugin to
allow you to do that. Something like add from server
or Media from FTP. Now those are the two
big reasons why you would want to use FTP
for your site. One, uploading a plugin
two, fixing an error or a problem with
your site and you can't access your WordPress dashboard
directly. Did you learn something from today's video? If so
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tips to help you manage your WordPress website and thanks for watching.