How to Publish your iWeb site with FTP

Apple provides a very handy video on exactly how to do this! Just click here to watch it on the Apple website. You can also watch it using YouTube right here:

When configuring your publishing location as FTP, fill in the host as ftp.yourdomain.com and use the FTP username and password as provided in the email we sent you when you first signed up with us. If you need to reset your FTP login details, here’s how!

You will also need to ensure the Directory/Path field is set to ‘httpdocs’

For those who prefer to skim, here are the same directions in written format:

1. Select the site you wish to publish in the sidebar. If you only have one, it’s likely called “Site”
2. Change the “Publish To” dropdown to “FTP Server” (Note that if you don’t have the option to publish to an FTP server then you have an older version of iWeb which doesn’t support this functionality. You will need to publish your website in two steps, see the section below on publishing your iWeb site from old versions of iWeb for more information)
3. Name your site whatever you like and enter your contact email address
4. Under the FTP Server Settings section, specify the server address as ftp.yourdomain.com (e.g.: ftp.websavers.ca)
5. Supply your FTP Username and Password where prompted
6. Enter ‘httpdocs’ in the Directory/Path field
7. The Protocol can be set to either FTP or SFTP for good results. If you have trouble with one, try the other!
8. Choose the Test Connection button to be sure everything will work. If you get an error, let us know in the comments below or open a support ticket.
9. Enter your website address

When you’re ready to publish simply press the “Publish Site” button to begin uploading. Now that you’ve saved the server settings, you will only need to press the Publish Site button every time you wish to upload changes!

Publishing multiple sites with iWeb

If you have more than one site set up in iWeb, you will need to first decide how you want to host them on your new account with Web Savers. If they are separate sites altogether in iWeb, then you will need to reconfigure each of them to publish to the location of your choice on your Web Savers account. You can set them up as:

1. Separate domains
   If you have our Titanium or Platinum plan and you would like each of your sites to be a completely separate domain (like yourname.com and yourcompanyname.com), then configure the first site in iWeb with the FTP username and password that we emailed to you and publish it. Your first site should be live! To set up the second domain, login to Plesk, create the second domain and provide Plesk with the FTP login details and path you would like to use for the second site. Configure the second site in iWeb using these new FTP details and path value, then proceed to publish. This is how it will work for any additional domains you’d like to use for your iWeb sites. Don’t forget to login to the registrar and update the name servers for each domain to point to your Web Savers account.
2. Subfolders
   You can also simply upload each site into subfolders on your singular primary domain. For example, one site could be configured to upload to yourname.com (in the httpdocs folder) while the second could be at yourname.com/site2. It’s easiest to simply have one site in iWeb, with a folder for each additional website. This way you only need to publish once to publish all of your websites and there is only one configuration. On the other hand, if you wish to keep the publishing separate for each, set up each website as a separate site in iWeb then configure the site’s Path configuration option to publish to httpdocs/site2 (for example). Keep all other FTP connection details the same as your first site configuration.
3. Subdomains
   With subdomains you can upload each additional iWeb created site to an address like http://site2.mydomain.com and http://site3.mydomain.com. To do this, login to Plesk, choose Create Subdomain and input new FTP login details if prompted. Remember the path it shows you (or requests of you to create) as you’ll need to provide this path to iWeb when configuring the site for publishing. On Plesk 9, the path will be subdomains/[subdomain_name]/httpdocs. On Plesk 10, you get to specify where you’d like the path to be. If you created new FTP login details for the subdomain in Plesk, configure iWeb’s publishing settings for the site using those, otherwise use the FTP login details you use for the master domain. Click Publish and you should be all set!

Publishing from Old Versions of iWeb (less than ’09 / 2.x)

Older versions of iWeb don’t support publishing directly to an FTP server, so you will need to publish your site in two steps.

Step 1

When you’re done making your edits, choose File > Publish to a Folder and select the folder of your choice. If you’re not sure how to do this, see this Apple KB article for detailed instructions.

Step 2

Load the FTP application of your choice. If you’re not sure which application to use, check out our guide to FTP for help selecting and using an FTP application to upload your files. Once you’re connected to the server, open up the httpdocs folder. (Warning: be careful not to open the httpSdocs folder — this is the wrong one).

On your computer, locate the folder that contains your web site content that you created with iWeb. You should see a file called “index.html” as well as a folder titled the same as the name of the website in iWeb. Open up this folder and drag and drop all content within to the server’s httpdocs folder. Once it is complete your site should now be visible!

Each time you need to make changes to the site content, complete these same two steps above. Your FTP application will prompt you to overwrite the existing website content, to which you should agree if you wish to see the changes published.