I realize that this could be written in pure Perl, without relying on wget, but why reinvent the wheel?
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
$datedir=`date +%F`;
chomp $datedir;
$rootdir="/var/backup/web/".$datedir;
$ftpsite="ftp.website.com";
$credentials="/root/ftp.txt"; #text file, one line: username:password
mkdir ("$rootdir", 0755) unless (-d "$rootdir");
open (UPASS, $credentials) or die;
$creds = <UPASS>;
close (UPASS);
($username,$password) = split (/:/,$creds);
$username=~s/\s+//; #strip whitespace characters - just in case
$password=~s/\s+//;
chdir($rootdir);
$result=`wget ftp://$ftpsite/Web --user=$username --password=$password -nH -m --cut-dirs=1`;
open (LOGFILE,"> backup.log");
print LOGFILE "$result";
close (LOGFILE);