Our car club had to migrate to a new hosting provider after many years running on a site that was maintained via DreamWeaver and SCP’ing or FTP’ing files back and forth. This webmaster has since left the club.
The club paid a consultant to migrate from the old website to a new hosting provider on a new site,and the consultant installed Elementor for a page builder and Astera for a theme; neithor are the paid for versions, which so far has been OK.
I have recently taken over the management of the site; but the new hosting provider only provides WordPress dashboard access to be able to manage the site.
Are there plugins that get me access to the config files or some lower level of access?
Would there be a plugin that would give me SCP or FTP access to be able to backup or mirror the new website?
As an example when I asked the hosting provider about how can I do backups he suggested the plugin UpdraftPlus saying the free version should suffice.
Additionally for security and performance and other reasons, the dashboard seems to be somewhat limiting and I don’t want to really have to install many freemium plugins.
Thanks for listening,
Fred
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For backups, choose a plugin. Updraft is well regarded, as is all-in-one migration and backup, and WP Vivid. Don’t be shocked if you can back up for free, but recovery may require buying the plugin. Note that SCP won’t get you a good backup as you need both the files of the site *and* a backup of the database. Backup plugins understand this and will give you a single download that contains what you need to move or recover the site.
A car club web site I’ve managed in the past just used a gallery plugin, and uploads could be done in one step (either drag and drop the files to a new/existing gallery, or select the folder and do a upload of hundreds of files at once if necessary.) Free options are decent; paid options give you more control and display options.
Honestly I’m not sure what other reasons you need to have access to SSH, though I don’t think it’s unreasonable to give it to you. If things are slow make sure the images you’re displaying are optimized, and that you’ve got reasonable caching enabled (both of these, unfortunately, will require plugins.)
Plugins aren’t *bad*, but you need to keep them updated, and you should keep them to a reasonably small number. If you’ve got 50 plugins you’re doing it wrong, and if you’re not updating them regularly you’re doing it very, *very* wrong.
>Would there be a plugin that would give me SCP or FTP access to be able to backup or mirror the new website?
You can try free Migrate Guru plugin for manual FTP backups, it works very well, but I use its “big brother” which is BlogVault SaaS, which is from the same company, but without any restrictions (I bought their LTD/LifeTime Deal back in 2018. on AppSumo). It creates automatic daily backups on their servers.
I also use All in one WP migration plugin for scheduled offsite backups on our pCloud, as well as SG hostings’ daily backups, and with this setup I have 3 different backup systems “just in case” if anything goes wrong with other 2 backups.