A fresh WordPress install has well over a thousand files. Uploading them one at a time is like moving house by carrying each teaspoon separately. Your FTP client will open connections, ask permission, close connections and repeat, and the server may eventually tell you it has had enough.

That “enough” is a real message: a limit on connections per IP address. Hit it and every new attempt gets a 421 error.

The better method is to compress the site on your computer into a single .zip or .tar.gz file, upload that one file in binary mode, and extract it on the server. Your host’s file manager can usually do this, or you can use SSH if it is available. FTP itself cannot unzip anything, so do not wait for it to try.

Once extracted, reset the permissions to 755 for folders and 644 for files, and verify a few key files with hashes. Then delete the archive, because leaving a full copy of your site sitting in a public folder is the sort of tidy-up you only forget once.

Credit: Thank you to Claude for writing this filler content. It is an unsupervised learning task.