2.2 Uploading WP Files

Hey, welcome back to the WordPress Secure Setup Guide. In this lesson, we're gonna get the ball rolling by getting all of WordPress's files up onto your hosting account. So the first thing you're gonna need to do is download WordPress. So you can head to wordpress.org/download and then look for this blue Download button. And that's gonna get you a zip that has all of WordPress's files inside it. Now you should have your zip with WordPress inside it downloaded. And most installation guides will tell you at this point to extract the zip, and then upload all of the files onto your server. But there's actually a quicker way. And if you're setting up a lot of WordPress sites all the time, you're gonna wanna be able to do this is fast as you can. So the quicker way is to log into your cPanel. And most web hosts come with a cPanel. And when you set up your hosting, they'll email you details on the address that you need to go through to access cPanel. So once you're logged into cPanel, look for this section with the heading FILES. And then inside that, hit File Manager. And that's gonna open up this File Manager in a new tab or window. And by using File Manager, that saves you the trouble of having to set up an FTP client and use that as a separate program. Through File Manager, you can upload and download files and make modifications and things like that. On the left here, you have a directory tree. So what you wanna do is navigate to the folder for the domain that you wanna set your WordPress site up on. Now if you're setting WordPress up on the main domain for your hosting account, then that's just gonna be the public HTML folder. In this case, I'm setting this WordPress site up in a subdirectory. So I've navigated into that subdirectory and it's currently empty. So what I'm gonna do is hit this Upload button here. And now I'm gonna drag over the WordPress zip file that I just downloaded and drop it on this square to upload it. When that hits 100% and it's done, then click the Go Back link here at the bottom. Now we're gonna extract the zip that we just uploaded. So click it to select it and then look for this Extract button here. Click that and it will ask you if you want to extract the file inside the folder that you're already located in. So just click the Extract Files button, then just Close this. And now, inside this folder, you have all the contents of a WordPress installation. The only thing we need to change now is it's stuck inside this WordPress folder. And we want to have it in this main folder here. So we'll actually just delete that zip file because you don't need that anymore. We'll go into the wordpress folder, click Select All. Now we'll click Move up here. Now all we need to do is delete this wordpress of the end and the trailing slash. And then click Move Files. Now we'll go back up one level. And now inside our main folder that we're working in, we have all of our WordPress files. We just have this empty wordpress folder that the extracted files were initially inside. So we'll just delete that, and now we're good to go. And there's something that you should check on at this point. And that is making sure that the permissions on all these files and folders don't allow anybody to change these files that shouldn't be changing them. And the way to check the permissions is to look at the number down in this right side column. And what you want is for every directory to have a permission number that reads 755. And for every file to have a permission number that reads 644. Now let me show you what that means. If I select this folder and then I click Permissions. You can see that I have a grid here that determines who can read, write or execute the item that we're looking at the permissions for. Now if I check this box here, watch the number change. Now that's changed this third number to 7. And what I've done is I've said that anybody in the world can write into this folder, but we don't want that. We wanna make sure that only the user, you, are able to write into this folder. So you can have a look at that permission grid there to get an idea of what the different numbers mean. So once you've done your upload, just make sure that you're seeing these numbers against the files and folders of WordPress. All right, so that's all the WordPress files up on your hosting account. And as you remember from the last lesson, that's one of the major aspects of WordPress. The other major aspect is the database. So we're gonna go through and set up a database in the next lesson. I'll see you there.