There are quite a few reasons you would need to use FTP if you have a website, especially if it’s a blog. In order to upload web pages, install a new theme, or upload a plugin, you will need to know how to FTP.

Here’s the step-by-step (If you already have FileZilla installed, skip to step 5):

1. Download Filezilla. (It gives you a few options, I would choose the .exe version.)

2. Double click the setup.exe, which should be on your desktop if you downloaded it correctly.

3. An installation wizard will come up, click ‘next’ 3 times, then click ‘install’, and then ‘close’.

4. You should now have a new Filezilla icon on your Desktop, double click it to open FileZilla, which will look like this:

5. Locate where FileZilla wants you to type in your website’s address, user name, and password. For the address, it will usually be your domain name - without the www, for example: yourdomainname.com. Some of you will have to add ftp [dot] in front of it, for example: ftp.yourdomainname.com. You will then type in your hosting account user name and password. If you don’t have it, contact your web hosting company - they will give it to you. Once you’ve typed them all in, you will click ‘Quickconnect’. Well done, you have connected through FTP!

For a good example, let’s say that we need to upload a WordPress plugin to our server using FTP. Here’s how we would do that, assuming we have already done steps 1-5.

We would first find the plugin on the left side of our screen. (The left side of our screen shows the files that are on our local computer.) Let’s say that we downloaded the plugin to our Desktop. We have to find the Desktop icon in FileZilla:

Double-click the Desktop location, and then it will show you all of the files on the Desktop - they will appear below where you double-clicked. Find your plugin.

You will then need to browse through the folders on the right to find the right location to upload the plugin to. Many times while uploading a WordPress plugin, you will be told to upload the plugin to the wp-content/plugins directory. This means that you will first need to double-click ‘wp-content’, and then locate ‘plugins’.

Now all you have to do is drag and drop your plugin from where it is on the left to the ‘plugins’ folder on the right. That’s it! FileZilla will transfer the file to your plugins directory.

Transferring a theme would be the same idea, find the theme you want to upload on the left, and drag it to the ‘themes’ folder on the right.

Now that you know how to FTP, you should find some fun new plugins and a shiny new search engine optimized theme.