When you do not have a FTP Client or do no thave the time to download and install any of the free ones available on the internet, a good option is using the built-in FTP client of Windows which is a part of the Windows Explorer functionality. You can do almost everything a regular FTP client does, albeit with a less richer interface.
Your webhost normally gives you some default FTP accounts, you would need to get these to log into the website to upload or download files using FTP (look into the control panel of your webhost). We will assume that the following are your details in this entire article
Domain: www.example.com
FTP Username: user1
Password password1
The first thing you need to do is Open Windows Explorer and type in ftp://username@domainname.com in the addressbar. In our example, based on the assumed values above, we would type in ftp://user1@example.com
This method works most of the time and is supported by most web hosts, however some of them might support alternative methods like typing in ftp.domainname.com might work. You would have to check with your webhost.
Now once you are logged in, the folder you would be after would normally be public_html. Most hosted content is uploaded here. For security purposes any Files or folders apart from the public_html folder are not normally visible on the web.
Inside the public_html folder, you will see various files and folders depending on the options you have installed and the webhost. The folders that start with a dot (.) and the cgi-bin control the functioning of your account so do not normally mess with them or rename them. By default there would be a defaul.html, default.htm, index.html, index.htm, index.php or other similar file that would be the default web page visitors reach when they type in the url of the website in the browser. This file is known as the default home page of your site.
To download or upload any files to or from the webhost, you just need to drag and drop the files into the FTP window or from the FTP window to another folder on your desktop. To be organized, we would normally create many sub folders like images, documents, etc. We can do that by right-clicking in the FTP folder and select “New Folder” just as we normally do on the local machine. The transfer of files would normally take a while depending on the size of the files which is obvious because the webhost might be remotely located. Other functionality like refreshing and deleting files work just as they would in Windows Explorer.
To log out of the session just close the Windows Explorer window. To summarize, this brief tutorial demonstrated how easy it is to use the built-in FTP client of Windows to upload and download files to and from your webhost without an external 3rd party FTP client.
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