We will have a different post for publishing on WordPress from a plugin, but this different. This is how to post your trust.txt file when you have access to the hosting service.
What’s the difference?
Even if you have the highest level of administrative access on your WordPress account, you can’t use that to place text files in the root or home directory.
Your WordPress site is like an application on your computer. Your browser, for example, probably sits in a folder called “Applications.” Similarly, your WordPress lives in a folder somewhere on your host site. While you can add files to some folders from your WordPress account (images, for example) you can’t add files to the folder where WordPress application sits.
For that, you’ll need to go to your website host. Your hosting company may be something like HostGator or BlueHost. Or your host may be the same company that you registered your domain on, like GoDaddy, Name.com, or Domain.com.
Each of these has a different interface, so this may not look like what you see, but hopefully this will show you the steps and you’ll be able to get through it. (If you have some tricks about the particular host/registrar that you use, feel free to take some screenshots and send it in to us and we’ll add to this post, or make a new post, and give you all the credit and thanks.)
Steps to posting the trust.txt file once you are logged into your host
- The first step is to find where all the files are located. You may see some options that look something like this:
You will want to click on “hosting” or whatever other button you have that will take you to all of your files. - Now you need to go to where the files are actually kept. There may be some extra choices here that do not really apply, but you will want to open a window that looks something like this:
What you may see is something like this, and you will wonder if you went to the wrong place. For whatever reason, even if your site loads really quickly, the actual folders that have your website may take a minute to load, and you won’t even know what’s going on. You will have to look close to see something like this:
There you will see that the little wheel is spinning next to the files. Give it a minute. - Now you need to find the root directory. If you only have one website, this should be relatively easy. If you have more than one, it may be a bit tricky because the folder you need may not be the same name as the website. For instance, in this example the folder we need is actually called “MyCMS5.”
How do we know that’s the right folder? Because of the folders in that folder: wp-admin, wp-content, etc. Those are the folders that have the guts of your WordPress site.(NOTE: Be careful in here. If you delete, for example, one of these folders, your site will just stop working. It’s typically not that easy to accidentally delete something, but you should really focus while you are doing this, don’t get distracted and try to do it while you are doing something else.) - Now click on that folder, and you should be able to see all of the contents. For us, the contents look like this:
- Now just look either for an upload or + button on that page, and upload your trust.txt file. You can see that we already uploaded ours, it’s right between readme.html and wp-activate.php.
- After you’ve done that, you can see if it is in the right spot by opening up a new browser window. Go to your site, and then in the URL window after the .com or .net or whatever just type in trust.txt and you will see your file there the same way the robots from Google and all the others will see it.
- You may want to bookmark this page so that if you ever need to edit your trust.txt file, you’ll find it a bit more quickly. Note that you will not be able to get to that bookmark without logging in and going to the actual section where you can see these files, as in Step 2, above.
Congratulations! You did it!