The WordPress.com Blog

Power Users Rejoice: You’ve Got SFTP and Database Access

Three new hosting management tools give you direct access to your site’s files and data.

December 18, 2019

Ian M.

Three new hosting management tools give you direct access to your site’s files and data.

Have a site on a Business or eCommerce plan? Now you have three new ways to customize your WordPress.com site: SFTP access, database access, and PHP version switching give you behind-the-scenes access to the nuts and bolts of your site, which means more freedom and flexibility than ever before. If you’ve ever gotten stuck trying to modify your WordPress.com site because you couldn’t manually upload file changes or delete something from your database, website management is about to get a lot easier.

You’ll find all these features in a new section of your dashboard: Manage > Hosting Configuration.

SFTP credentials

SFTP is a secure way to access the files and folders on your WordPress.com site using a program on your local computer like Filezilla. Some custom plugins and themes ask you to create specific folders or add files via SFTP. While many of those tasks can be accomplished with tools already built into your WordPress.com dashboard, folks who like using SFTP can now have SFTP access so they can make these changes directly. Check out our step-by-step guide to get started.

Database access

At WordPress.com, we regularly optimize your database so you don’t have to, but there might still be times when you need an efficient way to modify data, like purging all the tables created by a plugin you’ve decided to delete. Accessing your site’s database is an effective way to do this.

Database access is a powerful tool, so if you’re at all unsure about working with a database, reach out to our Happiness Engineers! If you’re unfamiliar with databases, you can also find information on getting started in our help documentation.

PHP version switching

PHP is still one of the key languages used to build the web, and a new version, PHP 7.4, was recently released. WordPress.com sites currently run PHP 7.3, which has been tested extensively across all of WordPress.com, but sites on Business or eCommerce plans can switch to version 7.4 immediately. Learn more.

Since these new tools let you dig into some of the code and data the powers your site, you’ll find a link for our support team right from the dashboard so you can get help if you need it. Have fun getting under the hood, power users!