Installing WordPress Manually using FTP (file transfer protocol)

Video Transcript

In the event you do not have a cPanel control panel, I didn’t want to you leave you guessing on how to use an FTP client to upload your WordPress install files. So in this video, I’m going to show you how to set up FileZilla as your FTP client so you can upload those WordPress files to your server.

First thing we need to do is to head on over to filezilla-project.org and click on the Download FileZilla client, not server but client. That’s going to take you to the download page. It’ll depend upon your operating system which direction you go here. If like me, Windows 64-bit, then this is the guy you want to download. And by the way, there’s plenty of tutorials here and information here on how to get the most out of FileZilla.

Once you have it downloaded and installed, go ahead and open it up. It’ll look like this. And you can use the information sent to you from your hosting service on how to log into your server by way of FTP. And more times than not, they’re going to give you a host name. And sometimes it’s going to start with ftp://yourdomainname. Then put in your username, password, and the port, depending upon, as it shows here as I hover over this, if you’re going with just FTP, it’s 21. If it’s SFTP, then it’s 22. Click on Quick Connect. And that’ll open up your server over here on the right. And on the left is the local or your computer.

You can also do this by using the site manager that you can get to up here in file. And then in the drop-down, click on site manager. And then click on New Site, give it a name, and then enter that same information here as you would in the Quick Connect section up here. Now under the Advanced tab, Transfer Settings, Charset – all that stuff is fine and dandy just the way it is by default. But like I said, there’s plenty of tutorials online and at filezilla-project.org on how to set all the stuff up and take advantage of all the goodies that it has to offer. But basically, in my example, I put in my host name here. I can leave the port blank, but I will put in 21. It changed the protocol in the Download button here to FTP, if it wasn’t already. Encryption, I chose only use plain FTP, which it does show as being insecure – versus these other options here. Changed the Login Type from Anonymous to Normal. Put in my username, password. Click on Connect. And then just like in the previous video where we had the file manager under cPanel, come on down here to public_html. Double click on that to open it up. And it is here that we want to upload our unzipped WordPress file.

If you recall, as we did in the previous video where we went to WordPress.org and downloaded that, in this example, we need to unzip this. I’m going to right-click on that. And I’m going to go with 7-Zip, which is a free compression software. You can also use the Extract All, which I believe is the default for Windows. And I’m not sure what the equivalent is with the Mac. But I’m going to go ahead and extract that right here.

Now I want to upload the contents of the WordPress folder – not the WordPress folder itself, just the contents of that folder. I kind of touched on that a little bit in the previous video. Go and get this out of the way. Over here on my computer side, I want to navigate to that location. And it’s on my desktop under working, inside of WordPress. I want to select the top one, hold the Shift key down on my keyboard, and select the bottom file. That’s going to select all of these guys here. Now I can just right-click, and then left-click on Upload, or just left-click, hold, and drag them all over here. That’s going to start the process of uploading it. You can see here queued files. It’s counting down as they’re being uploaded. And things are moving along pretty fast. So a lot of this speed has to do with the Internet connection that I’m on. So if you are a user of Google Fiber, for example, then chances are speed is not an issue.
Now at this point, I want to go over to my hosting account and create the database. And again, I’m doing this video assuming that you don’t have access to cPanel. And since I do have cPanel, I can’t really demonstrate how you would create a database without using cPanel. So if you’re unsure on how to do that with your particular hosting service, contact your hosting service and tell them you need to create a database for your WordPress install. And there we are.

Now the rest of the installation process is exactly the same as it was in the previous video. So let’s go ahead and go through the process anyway. Now we’re done here. Let’s go ahead and minimize this. And by the way, if you do have cPanel and do want to use FileZilla – which you’ll find it will come in handy at some point in the future anyway – go ahead and log into your cPanel control panel. Come on down here into the Files box where we have the File Manager at in the previous video. You’re going to also find something related to FTP accounts. Go ahead and click on that. And you can scroll down here. You can create additional accounts for your FTP logins and choose whichever one you want, be it anonymous or FTP or your main one. But over here on the right, click on Configure FTP Client. And in that drop-down, you’ll have instructions on how to set up FileZilla as well as these other two. Leastways this is what’s on my cPanel. Yours might be a little bit different, but I just want to point this out.

So now, just as we did yesterday – let me click on that to close that up – we want to enter in our browser address bar up here our domain name and start the install process. And click on Enter, choose the language. Click on Continue. Now one thing I wanted to point out I did not point out in the previous video was that right here, what this process is doing is automatically changing the wp-config-sample file – which we can see right here. What it’s actually going to do is take this wp-config-sample.php file and create another file titled wp-config.php. And it’s that new file that’s going to contain all of our password information for our database – database name, username, and that password. Let’s go ahead and get this back out of the way. So you can, in fact, do what it says here, make those changes manually, upload the wp-config.php file to the server, and then simply delete the config-sample.php file. So that is an option.
Let’s go ahead and click on Let’s Go. Fill in the blanks again just as we did in the previous video. And then click on Run the Install. And then just fill in the blanks as we did in the previous video, making sure that your username is anything but admin – that’s a big no-no – and that your password is strong and you get the little notification here if it’s weak or strong. And you should always have a minimum of eight characters, ideally 12 or more characters. And they should include special characters or symbols as well as upper and lowercase letters and numbers. Put in an active email address here, one that you receive and check on a regular basis. And by default, this box is checked. I uncheck this box so that the search engines will not be indexing our site until I’m ready for it. And then click on Install WordPress, and we’re done. Click on Login, use a password, and we’re good to go.

That’s going to bring us to the end of this video on how to manually install WordPress using FileZilla’s FTP client to upload the WordPress files. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.