File Transfer Protocol was born in 1971, which makes it roughly as old as the floppy disk. Its job is simple: move files from one computer to another. It has done that job faithfully for decades.

The trouble is that FTP was designed in a friendlier era, when the internet was a handful of universities that mostly trusted each other. Nobody thought about encryption, because nobody expected a stranger to be listening. Your username, your password and your files all travel in plain text, like a postcard written in large, clear handwriting.

For a WordPress site, that matters. The files you upload include themes, plugins and wp-config.php, which holds your database password. Send those over plain FTP on a shared network and anyone with a packet capture tool can read them.

So is FTP useless? Not quite. It is fine for a practice site on your own lab network, where the only snooper is the cat. For anything live, treat plain FTP like a fax machine: historically important, occasionally still around, and not where you send secrets.

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