How to Upload Your Website Using FTP

Uploading Your Site Over FTP

FTP is how you move website files from your computer onto your hosting. This guide creates an FTP account, connects to it, and puts your files in the right place.

If your site is WordPress, you probably do not need this at all — use the one-click installer instead. FTP is for uploading a site you already have.

Before you start

• Your hosting account is active
• Your website files are ready on your computer
• You have an FTP program installed — FileZilla is free and works on Windows, Mac and Linux

Step 1: create an FTP account

1. Log in to your control panel.
2. Open your website, then find FTP under the Advanced menu.
3. Click to add an FTP account.
4. Give it a username and a strong password, and note them down.
5. Save.

Make this password a real one, not something memorable. An FTP account is a door straight into your website files.

Step 2: connect

Open FileZilla and enter:

• Host: your domain name
• Username: the FTP username you just created
• Password: the password you just set
• Port: 21

Click Quickconnect. Your computer's files appear on the left, your hosting on the right.

Step 3: upload into the right folder

This is the step people get wrong, so read it twice.

1. On the hosting side, open the public folder for your website. Anything outside it will not be served to visitors.
2. On your computer side, find your website files.
3. Select them and drag them across.
4. Wait for the transfer queue at the bottom to finish and report no failures.

Upload the contents of your site folder, not the folder itself. If you end up with yoursite.com/mywebsite/index.html instead of yoursite.com/index.html, you have uploaded one level too deep — move the files up a level.

Your home page must be named correctly

The web server looks for a specific file name to serve as your home page. Use index.html or index.php. A file called home.html or Index.HTML will not be picked up automatically.

No FTP program? Use the file manager

Your control panel has a file manager built in, which is often quicker for a handful of files — no software to install and no connection details to enter.

For a whole site, FTP is still the better tool. For fixing one file, the file manager wins.

If something goes wrong

• It will not connect: check the username and password, and that you used port 21. Some office and school networks block FTP entirely — try another connection to rule that out.
• Uploaded, but the site does not appear: nine times out of ten the files are in the wrong folder, or the home page is not named index.html or index.php.
• You still see the old site: try a private browsing window. Your browser is probably showing you a cached copy.

Rather we did it?

If you are moving an existing site to us, do not upload anything — we migrate it for you, free. Open a ticket and tell us where it lives now.