File and Content Management

The best way to access and edit files on your server is by setting up an FTP connection. FTP is short for File Transfer Protocol and it’s simply a way for your home computer to communicate and exchange data with the server.

There are many different FTP clients that you can use to do this with. I recommend using Filezilla, which is available for Windwos, Mac an Linux operating systems.

For reference, here’s a reminder on how to fill out the required fields, when setting up your connection:
 Host: either your main domain name with “ftp.” added to the beginning or the IP address of your hosting account. 

 Port: usually 21. 
 Logon Type: select “normal”. 
User: Enter your username here.  Password: Enter your password here.
Click on the “OK” button to save these settings.
Now, you can select this connection from the menu in the top left corner and click on the “Connect” button.
Once you click “Connect”, you’ll see the window on the right get populated with a list of files and folders. These are the files and folders on your server.

Open the “public_html” folder:

Among the files and folders in the “public_html” folder, you’ll see three folders with names beginning with “wp-“. This is where your WordPress installation is located. The one we are interested in is the one called “wp- content”. Double-click on it to open this folder.
Within, you’ll find three folders that are important: “plugins”, “themes” and “uploads”. As you can imagine, “plugins” is where your WordPress plugins are located, “themes” is where the themes are located and “uploads” is where all other files such as pictures and audio-files are located.

Now, to get a feel for how to use the FireFTP and how works with your website, let’s just upload a random image. The image doesn’t have to have anything to do with your blog and no one but yourself will ever see it, so just grab any random image you have stored on your hard-drive.
We are going to upload this image to the “uploads” folder, so the first thing to do is to open the “uploads” folder in FireFTP by double-clicking it.

In the file management window on the left side (which represents your computer), navigate to the folder that contains the file you want to upload. If you are using Windows and the file is on your desktop, you’d navigate to the desktop. If it’s located in your “Pictures” folder, you’d  navigate to Users\Yourusername\Pictures and select the picture from there.

I have created a simple image called “example.png” and placed it in one of my image-folders. All you need to do next drag and drop the image file from the left side of Filezilla into the folder you want to upload it to, on the right side.

The upload will begin immediately and just a second or two later, you should see the new file listed in the folder on the hosting account.
Now, to navigate to that image, input the following address into your browser’s navigation bar:
http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/filename.jpg
Shologoo