FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is one of the oldest ways to move files between your own computer and a web server. You log in with a host address, a username and a password, and then you can drag files back and forth, much like copying them between two folders on your desktop. It has been around since the 1970s and still quietly powers a lot of website maintenance.
Think of it as a courier service for files. You hand a package to the courier with an address on it, and it gets carried to the server and dropped in the right place. An FTP client like FileZilla is the courier’s van: it shows your files on one side, the server’s files on the other, and lets you move them across.
There is one important catch. Classic FTP sends everything, including your password, as plain text, so anyone watching the connection could read it. That is why people now use SFTP or FTPS, which wrap the transfer in encryption. For day-to-day work, plenty of teams have moved past FTP entirely and deploy through Git or a host dashboard, though FTP still pairs naturally with a regular domain name and basic hosting.
The other quiet danger is that FTP has no memory. Drag the wrong file over a live one and it overwrites instantly, with no version to roll back to. That is fine for swapping an image, risky for editing a .htaccess file by hand, and exactly why deploy tools that track every change have largely replaced it.
At TopDevs we use secure transfers and automated deploys rather than manual FTP, so file changes are tracked and nothing slips through unencrypted.
