Step by Step guide on uploading a website via FTP

How to Upload

In this step by step guide we will be covering how to upload a website via an FTP Client and what checks to do to ensure that the website is fully uploaded and there were no errors in uploading, the FTP software we will be using in this guide is “Filezilla”, it is a basic FTP software with all the functions you would expect from standard FTP software.

Step one

The first thing anyone can do before uploading is getting software to upload unless of course you already have some. Dreamweaver does come with its own FTP software inbuilt but it tends to be unreliable, slow and quite irritating with its constant messages asking if it should upload dependant files, though this is good to remind web designers not to forget to upload other files it can get slightly annoying. But if you already have FTP software you can just skip down to step two.

One good alternative to the Dreamweaver FTP client is “Filezilla”; it is reliable, fast and best of all free! They have 2 versions, Client and server but we won’t go into that in this guide.

The client version is the one you want so the first thing to do is to download it and install it.

Step two

Assuming you have already installed your FTP software there are two important things that you must have before you upload anything anywhere, and those things are:

1. FTP Hostname
   • This is usually something like yourdomane.com or ftp.yourdomain.com
2. FTP Account (username and password)
   • This is an absolute must and should comprise of a Username & Password, you need to have an FTP account set up before you can access the server, this is usually set up in the control panel where all the other settings are done to do with the hosting, so if you don’t have any of these details just log on to the control panel of your hosting account and get the details, the FTP details section should be easily spotted once you are in the control panel.

Now that you are armed with the information you need all you need to do is start up the FTP client and the first things you will notice are the log in boxes and the directory displays and an empty box.

So what do I do know? Some of you may have already logged in – but for those who like to follow instructions to the letter; now what you have to do is input your details in to the equivalent boxes and you should see some activity which is the FTP client making a connection with the server and attempting a connection with the credentials you punched in if successful you should see the directory that your account has been set to see on when you log in and could have some folders called www or htdocs open up htdocs or if it doesn’t exist then www, it could also be that your account is set to load inside the correct folder anyway so it may be completely empty if that’s the case you can just upload to the current directory.

Step 3

Now that you have logged in and if needed went to the correct directory you are ready to upload a website and it’s as simple as dragging and dropping the files and/or folders to the server directory you can either manually go to the folder on your computer and drag and drop or use the local directory shown below to browse to your files.