What is cPanel?

It’s important to understand that cPanel is not a WordPress product, and WordPress does not use or come built-in with cPanel. Instead, cPanel is an open source piece of Linux software for administering a web host account as part of a LAMP stack.

Note: If your website is being hosted by WordPress.com, then you won’t be able to use cPanel, nor will you have any need to.

Whether or not you will be using cPanel depends on your web host, but cPanel is, by far, the most popular administration software used by customers of web hosting services.

cPanel is a graphical user interface (GUI) that runs on your browser and looks like a really old version of Windows because the latest version of cPanel was released in 1999. Despite its simple appearance, cPanel is a very powerful tool that lets you administer your website.

When you first activate your web host account, you may be able to install WordPress directly via cPanel in a section called “Auto Installers.” Once WordPress has been installed, you can do things like manage and examine your MySQL database, activate security tools, create email accounts, create FTP accounts, make backups, and change storage settings.

cPanel is designed to make it simple to click on various options and make changes to your website without having to know any code. cPanel usually doesn’t let you do anything that could break or disable your website, but you should always be very careful when making any changes with cPanel.

If you have any questions about cPanel or which settings to use in cPanel, contact your web host provider.

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Jamie Spencer

My name is Jamie Spencer and I have spent the past 10 years building money making blogs. After growing tired of the 9-5, commuting and never seeing my family I decided that I wanted to make some changes and launched my first blog. Since then I have launched lots of successful niche blogs and after selling my survivalist blog I decided to teach other people how to do the same.