How to Host Files on Your WordPress Website and Make it Downloadable

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) in the world. With its amazing flexibility and incredible growth, it’s clear that there’s a lot for anyone to do with WordPress. If you’ve been thinking about hosting files on your WordPress website – whether they are images, documents, or whatever – then this article is for you.

Why Should You Host Files On Your WordPress Website?

Even if you’re just looking to make a simple blog, you’ll soon discover that hosting files on your WordPress website offers many advantages.

WordPress is incredibly popular among creators and designers, as it makes publishing content easier than ever before. With its amazing flexibility and incredible growth, it’s clear that there’s a lot for anyone to do with WordPress. If you’ve been thinking about hosting files on your WordPress website – whether they are images, documents, or whatever – then this article is for you.

Faster Load Time

One of the biggest perks of hosting files on your WordPress website is that it’ll speed up your load time. If you’re running WordPress on your own computer, it’ll take quite a while to load your site at first, as all the files have to be downloaded and parsed by your computer. However, once WordPress has downloaded all the files and started up, the load time will be instantaneous, as all the data is already there and ready to go.

Improved SEO

Another huge advantage of hosting files on your WordPress website is that it’ll improve your SEO rankings. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s one of the most effective strategies to drive traffic to your site. When you have a lot of images, documents, or other files on your site, it’ll make your site more appealing to search engines like Google or Bing. In other words, it’ll get your site “clicked” on more frequently by search engines, meaning it’ll rank higher in search listings.

Flexible With What You Can Do

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is that it makes it extremely flexible with what you can do. If you think about it, WordPress is a fully functioning web platform, meaning it has all the tools needed to create a great looking website. This is a HUGE advantage, as you won’t have to spend a lot of time looking for plugins (or paying for them) to do the things that you want to do. Instead, you can use the native WordPress functionality to build your site as you see fit.

Secure

WordPress is a very popular platform among bloggers, as it’s very secure and simple to use. This means that it has an incredible level of security built-in, as there’s nothing a lot more frustrating than publishing content and then having it hacked or vandalized. To prevent this from happening, WordPress has a very robust security system, which you can enable from the built-in dashboard. This dashboard, known as the WordPress admin area, is located at http://yourwpurl.com/wp-admin/. When you visit this area, you’ll see a warning message telling you that the site is protected by an upgraded security system and that you must have a passkey to access the content (more on that later).

Manual Update

If you’re the type of person that enjoys being informed of the latest news and trends, you’ll appreciate the manual update feature built into WordPress. This feature allows you to update content without having to log in to your site. As long as you have internet access, you can keep your site updated by simply visiting the WordPress dashboard and clicking the appropriate button. As a result of this feature, you’ll notice that WordPress keeps itself up-to-date automatically, without the need to manually update content.

Easier To Install

WordPress is really easy to install. If you’re looking to create a new site or want to update an existing one, you can use WordPress’s amazing one-click install to get started. This feature makes it incredibly easy to get up and running with WordPress, as you won’t have to worry about any kind of configuration at all. Simply choose a domain and enter a few keywords, and WordPress will take care of the rest. One of the best things about this feature is that WordPress will walk you through the entire setup process, as long as you have internet access. If you’ve never setup a site with WordPress before, this feature may seem intimidating, as it’ll require some research on your part to know what to do. However, once you enter the one-click install, it’ll walk you through the entire setup process, step-by-step.

Extensible

Even if you’re just a casual blogger who wants to share your thoughts and feelings on a daily basis, you’ll appreciate the extensible nature of WordPress. This is a great platform to grow with, as you can add more features to your site with the help of plugins (short for “plugins”). Simply visit the WordPress dashboard and click the appropriate button to add more features to your site. Some of the more popular features that you can add to your site include:

• Live Chat – Allows for real-time communication with visitors via a chat window.
• Password Protected Posts – Posts that are password protected can only be viewed by the visitor who has the password. This is a great way to keep content proprietary while still allowing for some flexibility in terms of who can view it.
• Social Media Integration – Add your social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and let your readers connect with you on an even deeper level.
• Video Gallery – Let viewers engage with you, your product, or service in a whole other way: via video.
• Product Review(s) – Allow customers to leave reviews of your products or services, which you can then use to learn more about your audience and what they want.
• Advanced SEO – Get better rankings for your site with these powerful SEO plugins that can help you discover keyword and phrase variations that can drive more organic traffic to your site.

As you can see, there’s a lot that WordPress can do, as it’s a fully functioning web platform. This is a great choice for anyone who wants to quickly and easily create a professional-looking website with a minimal amount of effort.

How To Host Files On Your WordPress Website And Make It Downloadable

Now that you have everything set up and you’re ready to start hosting files on your website, let’s get down to business.

The simplest (and recommended) way to make files accessible to visitors is to upload them to your WordPress site and then refer to the files via an HTML5 link. HTML5 is an acronym for the HyperText Markup Language, which is essentially the language that websites are built on. When you create an HTML5 link, you’re telling the browser that this is a link that leads to another website, and you’re not connected to this site in any way. As a result, the browser will consider this a completely separate site and will not consider your site’s content when grading its load time or SEO score. To learn more, visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/. You can also check out HTML5 (and other) link types for more information about these types of links.

Another great way to make files available is to use WordPress’s built-in download feature. As the name suggests, this feature allows you to download files (such as images or documents) that you’ve uploaded to your site. To use this feature, navigate to the file you want to download in your WordPress dashboard and click the “Download” button at the top of the screen. WordPress will then ask you if you want to download the file, and if so, where you’d like it saved.

The best place to save these files is in your WordPress Media library, as this is where all your files are stored when you use the WordPress default settings. However, if you’d like to keep track of your downloads, you can use a dedicated download tracking plugin such as Download Monitor, which will store all your download information in a CSV or Excel file. This information can then be used to track detailed reports about your download activity.