SSH and stuff is great if you're very profecient at it, but I wouldn't recommend it if you don'r have experience running a server.
You can easily fuck things up, and then you're screwed because your host will not be able to help you unless you pay tooth and nail for yuor server like on liquidweb where you indirectly pay for support like that.
Uploadeding file by file is indeed a painstaking process, this is why I use the cpanel file manager to zip up files for me for lots of small files, and the download the zip file, you can do the same with uploads, you can upload a wordpress zip archive and inflate it in file manager.
Much better method for noobs because you don't have to learn command like language.