Wednesday, May 31, 2017

6 Tips for Managing Your Site with cPanel

If you use shared hosting for your website, chances are good that you are managing your site with cPanel. The cPanel software is the prevalent administration panel for a significant number of hosting companies out there, but many people who use it don't stop to check out the features that it offers. With cPanel, depending on what your host offers and what your hosting package includes, you can manage domains that are attached to your account, email accounts, files and databases, and many other administrative tasks, all made easier with a single interface.

In this article, we'll walk through six tips for managing your site with cPanel, that you may or may not have seen in your own hosting adventures. Experienced users may already know about these items, but newer users, expecially those who haven't taken the time to really look through their cPanel interfaces, may not have seen these options. In fact, sometimes even experienced users can get bogged down in routine and forget some of the options available to them, so it's worth a look!

The first two items are not default features of cPanel, but rather available "cPanel Apps", meaning that some hosts may have them, some may not, and some may have more than one option. They're still mentioned here because of how common they are, and how incredibly useful.

Autoinstallers

cPanel Softaculous Auto Installer

Autoinstallers (such as Softaculous Auto Installer) are exactly what the name says. They provide a way to perform quick and painless installations of platforms that you may need in order to build a new website, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, forums platforms, and a variety of other content management systems, frameworks, and scripts. With a click or two you can have the platform you need installed on your new hosting and ready to go, rather than manually setting up databases, uploading files via FTP, and running through setup processes, troubleshooting issues as you go. It's a great feature that is sometimes overlooked, and saving time is something that even veteran site administrators can get behind!

SSL Certificates

cPanel Lets Encrypt

Another app that you may find in your cPanel is one that provides you with the ability to install an SSL certificate for your website, such as the LetsEncrypt cPanel app. If you're not very familiar with SSL certificates, and the growing need for every site to use HTTPS, you should take the time to learn about it. Many hosts, including SitePoint's partner, SiteGround, provide these certificates free, via the cPanel, for all, or at least some payment tiers, of their customers. And if you're using a CMS such as WordPress, here are some tips for getting set up with an SSL certificate

Securing your site with HTTPS will make it easy for all visitors to see that security is important to you, as any modern browser will indicate with a green lock when a site is HTTPS and secure. The growing pressure from Google and others to force all sites to become HTTPS only makes it more urgent, and that much greater of a feature that you can set one up right from your cPanel.

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by Jeff Smith via SitePoint

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