On today’s episode, we are going to talk about how you can navigate your host’s cPanel. What you can do there and how you can configure your website right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 352.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and we are going to wrap up this month of August talking about more technical things. We’re going to talk about your host’s cPanel and we’ll dive into that in just a few minutes. I do have a couple of announcements that I want to share with you. The first thing that I want to share with you today is a blogpost that Matt Mullenweg put out about the reason that we call this new editor, this new thing, that’s being worked on for WordPress, why we call it Gutenberg and it’s a big long article. I’m not going to talk about the whole thing but it’s a great read and there’s a link in the Show Notes for you to go ahead and read it but, basically, it’s talking about how Johann Gutenberg’s, when the press came out, people used to just use it to print the same religious text over and over and over again.

Then, after a few years, people began innovating and trying their hands at new types of writing and then it just really helped to – it helped the people that wanted to be able to get their word out into the public. They wanted to get their stories out and it just helped to benefit everybody and, essentially, that’s what Gutenberg is going to be bringing to WordPress. It’s going to help developers and agencies to create interactive templates that clients can easily break without dealing with custom post types. It’s going to help developers to be able to completely integrate every part of WordPress, including posts, pages, custom post types without having to hack into tiny MCE or squeeze their entire feature behind a single button on a toolbar. It’s going to help theme developers by not having to develop tons of additional plugins or page builders to get the theme to work right.

It’s going to help our core developers be able to work in modern technologies and not have to worry about 15 years of backwards compatibility. They’re going to be able to simplify how menus and widgets and the editor work with a common set of code and concepts. It’s going to help web hosts have better signup rates as Gutenberg opens up WordPress to an entirely new set of people whom WordPress was too complicated or too hard to set up from before and it’s going to help users. They will finally be able to build their sites that they see in their imaginations. They will be able to do things on mobile that they have never been able to create before. They will never have to see a short code again. Text pasted from Word will get cleaned up and converted to blocks automatically.

So, those are just a few things that this article highlights and it is scary for making this giant new feature inside WordPress. It looks like they are targeting to ship with WordPress 5.0. The release will come out when Gutenberg is ready, not vice versa, so they’re not going to try to hit a specific date to get WordPress 5.0 out. But I think this is kind of a good thing. I know that we, in past years, haven’t gotten brand-new huge features at the big releases of 4.0 and 5.0, but I think it’s kind of cool that it’s going to come out in WordPress 5.0. There’s not really a timeframe so far. They’re still working on trying to get a target date to try to figure out how much is left in the development. But if you want to check this out and you want to see the future of WordPress, how it is going to look, and how it’s going to look in the future, head on over and install the Gutenberg plugin you can find in the WordPress repository. The other thing I want to share this week is I was just back from the Podcast Movement and it was a great time. We had a nice booth and we had an opportunity to talk to other WordPress developers. One of my favorite things to do about going to conferences is usually doing one-on-one tech support live in-person but we didn’t have a lot this time. Everybody was just happy that came to say hello and thank you for WordPress.

There was so many people that were making their full-time living by using a free piece of software, which I thought was really incredible. I mean, there was a range of people. We saw people that were developers and helping other podcasters launch their website. We saw podcasters who were, you know, able to do everything they needed to do with WordPress and there was just – I mean, I would say 90 percent of people there were already using WordPress and they were just so thankful that the software helped them do everything that they needed to and what they could achieve online. So, that was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the next conference, which will probably be in a couple of months. I think I’ll be heading, I guess, next month to WordCamp Ann Arbor. I’m planning on going to WordCamp US and just getting that opportunity to see people live and just talk.

It’s encouraging, especially when you spend time every single week preparing a podcast and hope that people listen to it and hope that people resonate and hope people are still using WordPress and to get actually out in the public, that’s really encouraging to me. All right, up next let’s talk about the plugin of the week. There’s more than 50,000 plugins and I’m truly amazed that every week I can find a brand-new plugin that I’ve never talked about before that has some sort of functionality that WordPress doesn’t have. This week is one called Pixel Caffeine and this is a plugin that will allow you to add a Facebook pixel to your site. You can add conversion tracking and create laser-focused custom audiences and so this gives you the ability to add that Facebook tracking pixel, so when somebody comes to your website, looks around a little bit and then they go out and go on other parts of the web, they’ll see advertisements, especially on Facebook.

They’ll see ads for your things and it allows you to get more information about your audience. I’m not an expert when it comes to Facebook and how the Facebook pixel works but if you are and you are looking to add that as part of your website strategy, I recommend checking out the plugin called Pixel Caffeine. It’s a free plugin in the WordPress repository. Okay, today let’s dive in and talk about cPanels and how to navigate them and what’s all there. So, let’s go ahead and first talk about cPanels. There’s actually one kind of software that’s called cPanel that most hosts install on their shared hosting environments. So, you can see this at A2 Hosting. You can see it at HostGator. You can see it at Bluehost and then other hosting companies like GoDaddy or Flywheel or Pressable. They all have different cPanels. They sometimes call them cPanels. Sometimes they just call them the backend or their dashboard, or whatever, but in general, all of your web platforms or wherever you’re hosting your website, you should be able to do ALL of these things. So, I’m going to breakdown what a generic cPanel (the actual cPanel) looks like and we’ll just kind of go through and talk about some of these things and some of them will reflect on past episodes of this month, talking about where we would do certain things like set up our email or change our DNS settings or things like that. So, let’s go ahead and just dive right in. So, when you open up your webhosting platform and I’m looking at A2 Hosting right now, their cPanel. Now the cPanel has changed since the last time I’ve used it. It has gotten an update. But, amazingly, all the details are here, so when you log in you are going to see a place on the left-hand side and it’s got a bunch of different areas. It’s got a files area, softilicious, staging, databases, whatnot. We’ll go through each one of those. Then on the right side there is general information.

So, it says what your current username is, your primary domain, your home directory, the IP address that you last logged in from. So, it’s got all that information. It’s got server information. It lets you know how much bandwidth you’ve used, how much mail server space you’ve used, how much Sequel database usage you’ve used, how much just, in general, that you’ve used, how many files are on your server, what the general CPU usage is, how many ftp accounts. There’s tons of information here… how many subdomains are set up. You can also see, if you click on the server information, you can get a little bit more information. You can see the cPanel version, so I can see that I’m using cPanel Version 64 that says what Apache version, what PHP version, what my Sequel version is.

Now that I’m looking, I’m seeing that I’m using a very old version of PHP. It says different architecture, so the operating system is Lennox. It says what that shared IP address is in case you need that. It’s got some other information, so if you need any of that information, especially if you’re trying to set up your IP address, or you’re A record, you will need to go in and find that IP address inside the server information under General Information in your cPanel. The other thing that I want to point out here that you may or may not have seen when you logged into cPanels at the very top, there is a place where you can find functions. So, in case you’re looking for ftp, you can just type in ftp and it will search and show you all of the different options that are there that have ftp in them or that are very similar to ftp. So, let’s go ahead and just dive right in and take a look at what’s there.

So, the first little sections – they are broken down into sections for light tasks. Okay, the first area that we want to look at is called the Files Area and this has all to do with files on your server. This is files for your website, in particular, so the very first one is File Manager. This allows you to navigate and you would see all of the files on your server. So, if you wanted to go in and if you had to deactivate a plugin by renaming it, you could go ahead and do this in File Manager. If you needed to make an edit or do some things you can do it all during the File Manager. It’s not the best interface – like, you can go in and you can see what’s happening but I would recommend using something more like an ftp account if you needed to do some of this. An ftp account is a way that you can communicate directly with your server. You’ll need an ftp program and so there’s a free one out there called FileZilla. I use Transmit for my computer but, basically, that allows me to navigate files and folders on the server right from my computer. It’s an easy way to just browse and just see what’s there. So, that’s all under the files. There’s also a section called Backup. So, Backup is the ability for the server itself to do backups and then there’s a Server Rewind. So, in case I needed to rewind and go back to a previous snapshot, you can do that as well. Now, granted that is not a specific WordPress backup. That is just going to be a backup of all your files, so that is something to think about there. So, that’s in the Files Area. The next one and these can be arranged in different orders, so you can click and drag these and put them wherever you want. So, in my particular case, Softilicious App Installer is next and that gives you the ability to install certain scripts.

So, there’s one within the A2 Hosting dashboard that is a WordPress A2 Optimize, so that comes with a caching plugin. It comes with some configuration that works best on A2 Hosting. You can also automatically install WooCommerce from here. You can install Drupal or CMS Made Simple or Joomla or any of the platforms that are out there that are built into the scripts. There are tons of them there and, I mean, the one that you will use the most is probably WordPress, as you are listening to a WordPress Podcast. So, that’s what’s in the App Installer. Underneath that, I am seeing staging so I have the ability to quickly and easily create a staging site or a duplicate copy of my website.

So, that’s really nice to be built into cPanel. This option may or may not be there depending on the host itself but with A2 Hosting I can easily create a staging site. So, if I was looking through an issue or working on why I was getting a conflict with different things, I would just go and create a duplicate copy of my website and then start turning things off and just seeing what’s causing the conflict. So, I really like that that’s built into cPanel. Under that on my setup is database, so I’ve got the option to log into PHP My Admin, which is the way that I can go in and view all the contents of my database for my WordPress site. I also have the ability to create databases and to manage users and to just manage all those types of things that’s under database.

I really only use the PHP My Admin because when you install WordPress it automatically creates a username and it gives that user access to the database, so you don’t really have to go in and create that yourself but you have that option as well. So, that’s under databases. In the SEO and Marketing Tools section – this is a section that I never use but you have the ability to go in and add SEO tools, you can increase website traffic, there’s SEO tips, and there’s information on how to link-build or build your links, a one-click sitemap setup, and Google website services. So, those are all under there. I can honestly say I’ve never used a single thing in the SEO Marketing area. Under that I’ve got domains and with domains I have the ability to add addon domains. So, with a shared hosting plan you could have multiple websites built on that same shared hosting plan.

So, if you have yourwebsiteengineer.com and then you had yourwebsiteengineerawesomelive.com, you know, whatever that is, you can add addon domains and every addon domain you can add an additional WordPress site. So, you can manage all that there right from the domains. They also have subdomains area and so you can create like store.yourwebsiteengineer.com and then you could have your store be a completely separate version of WordPress if you want it to. So, you can do that and then also in the domain settings it the DNS Editor. We talked about DNS a few episodes ago but you can go in and you can change exactly your setup and your configuration and you can do all of that right in the domain section. Next is an email section and so there’s all kinds of things that you can do.

You can set up email accounts. You can set up auto responders. You can do email routing. You can set up global email filters or email filters for a specific account. You can do encryption. There’s lots of stuff in here. It also includes calendars and contacts and so if you want to set up email using your hosting platform, the hosts that you’ve provided for your website, you can do all of that in the email section. In the Metrix Section, you have the ability to see some visitors, you can get raw access, you can see the CPU usage of your website, how much ram and storage is it taking up right now, you can see the bandwidth, how much activity are you getting to your website, and any error messages are all in the Metrix category or the section.

Then there’s the Security Section and this has the SSH Access, which gives you the ability to command-line into your server. So, much earlier we talked about the file browser or ftp. You can go in and you can visually see what’s going on but a lot of people like SSH access, which gives you the ability to go in and, with command-line you can use the WPCLI and you can go in and you can turn on plugins, you can turn off plugins, you can do a bunch of things and manage it all through the terminal. So, if that’s something that’s interesting to you, you could set that up through the SSH Access area. Also, in this area contains SSL certificates, so if you need to set that up with your hosting company, you can do that from the Security Section as well.

There are a few other things, like IP Blocker, Hotlink Protection and Link Protection. I’m not sure exactly what those are. I’ve never used those settings as well. Then moving onto software, there’s a bunch of different software things that you can do. The Cloudflare … you can set up Cloudflare for CDN or a content delivery network to make your images or your website look faster. You can look at PHP. You can see what PHP Version you’re using. You can look at Ruby on Rails or RubyGems, Pearl, if that’s something that you’re using on your website. You can optimize your website and that’s all kind of under the software bucket. A couple more sections here – we’ve got Advanced, so that talks about Tron Jobs and you can track DNS. You can look at your error pages, when an error pager looks across your website.

You can do Apache Handlers and a virus scanner. Those are all covered in the Advanced Section. Then the one last section at the bottom is Preferences, so you can change your password, your security, you can change your cPanel language, you can change your style, what you’re cPanel actually looks like, and then you can update your contact information in your User Manager. Now, there’s a lot in cPanel and I don’t want to overwhelm you with a ton of things but the main thing is there is a lot of things there but most of them you will only have to set up once and you don’t have to do it regularly. So, when you set up your domain, you can just set up your domain and just do it once. If you add a subdomain, you just use that section when you’re changing subdomains or when you’re working on your subdomain. If you want to update PHP, which you should regularly, you can do that right from your Hosting cPanel. Another thing is that PHP MyAdmin, if you have to get in and do some database work, you can do that right from there. So, it’s not like you’re going to be going to the cPanel very often.

I honestly don’t go there unless I’m actively building something. The yourengineer.com site, like I only go to the cPanel maybe like, I don’t know, six or seven times a year. It’s not very often. It’s only when I need to do some level of configuration with my website or I need to get information or maybe if I’m changing my IP address or just trying to get information about my website. That’s when I have to log in and look at cPanel. So, that’s going to wrap up this month of just learning about the things that are outside of WordPress that we should be knowledgeable about too in order to keep our website up and running. Okay, those are all the options that are found in the official cPanel.

As I said at the top of the show, you can find a lot of these settings are going to be in the other cPanels, the custom cPanels that are out there for the different hosts but they just may be in a little different area and you might have to click around a little bit to find exactly what you’re looking for. But that’s what I wanted to share with you today as cPanel is probably the most widely and most adopted use of a webhosting dashboard and so I just wanted to share that information today as we wrap up the month of August, as we talked about all the important things that are outside of WordPress that you need to know to keep your website up and running. Things like configuring your custom domain name and your DNS settings and all of these great technical jargon pieces in August.

Next month we’re going to dive right back into WordPress. I’ve got four great podcast episodes outlined for different things about WordPress that are a little out of the ordinary, if you will. So, until then, take care and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.