Your first tour of cPanel

Of the sixty or so icons on the cPanel home page, you will use about eight. The rest are there for edge cases, legacy software and things your hosting account already handles for you. This tour covers the eight that matter, tells you where they sit, and flags the three or four places where a single click destroys something you cannot get back.

This picks up from a working Hostworld hosting account that you can already log into: your cPanel username, password and login URL arrive when the account is set up, and your hosting product is listed in the client area at portal.hostworld.uk. If you have landed here from a search and have not got that far yet, get logged in first and come back.

Before you start

Two things will save you confusion later.

Know which interface you are looking at. cPanel currently ships two: Jupiter, which has been the default for years and shows you a long home page called Tools with grouped icons, and Meridian, introduced in cPanel & WHM v138, which reorganises the same functions into six goal-based hubs for Websites, Email, Files, Databases, Security and Performance. Meridian is opt-in and Jupiter is still the default, with both supported side by side. If you are counting sixty icons, you are on Jupiter, and this tour is written for Jupiter. If you see six large hubs instead, the tools described below still exist, they are just grouped differently.

One warning on theme switching. At least one hosting provider reports that accounts created directly on Meridian cannot switch themselves back to Jupiter, because the link to the classic theme does not appear for them. That is a provider knowledge base rather than cPanel's own documentation, so treat it as a caution rather than a rule. If you are stuck on an interface you did not choose, open a support ticket and we will sort it from our side.

Know your version. cPanel prints its version in the page footer. v134 is the 2026 Long Term Support release, v136 came in April 2026 and v138 in July 2026. It matters because guides written against older versions send you looking for tools that no longer exist. "Addon Domains", "Alternate Names" and "Subsites" were deprecated in v100 and removed in v106, and all of that now lives in a single Domains interface. Horde webmail has also been removed, with its calendar and contacts migrated into Roundcube, so ignore any article that offers you Horde as a choice.

Step 1: Use the search box, not your memory

The navigation bar at the top carries a search box, your account information and preferences, and logout. Type the name of a tool and cPanel filters the home page down to it. This is the single most useful habit to build on day one, because it works no matter which version you are on, no matter how the categories have been reordered, and no matter what a screenshot in some other article showed three years ago.

Type "php" and you should get the PHP tools. Type "ssl" and you get the SSL tools. If you remember only one thing from this article, remember that searching beats hunting.

Jupiter also has a Solutions page aimed at first-time users, with short tutorials on things like setting up an email account and getting a site online. If you would rather be walked through a task than shown a map, start there.

Step 2: Read the right-hand column before you touch anything

The column down the right of the home page carries General Information, Server Information and Statistics. General Information shows your current cPanel user, your primary domain, whether your IP is shared or dedicated, your home directory, your last login IP and your current theme.

Two of those come up constantly. Your primary domain is the domain the account was created against, and it behaves slightly differently from domains you add later. Your home directory is the path everything lives under, and it is the first thing a support ticket will ask you for when a file path is in question. Note both down now.

Statistics tells you your disk usage, your email account count and similar. Check it occasionally. A full disk breaks email delivery and database writes before it breaks anything visible on the website, so it tends to fail in confusing ways.

Step 3: Find File Manager, in the Files section

File Manager sits in the Files category. It is a browser-based file browser for your account, and for a single small site it is usually enough on its own without setting up FTP or SFTP.

Your website files belong in public_html. That is the document root, the folder the web server actually serves. A file placed one level above it, in your home directory, is not on your website. This trips up nearly everyone once.

The undo step matters here. When you select files and click Delete, cPanel asks whether to move them to the trash. Confirming sends them to the trash, from which you can recover them later. There is also a checkbox offering to skip the trash and delete permanently. Leave that checkbox unchecked. Emptying the Trash afterwards also deletes permanently. A recoverable mistake and an unrecoverable one are one tickbox apart.

Before any bulk edit, take a copy. Select the folder, compress it to a zip in place, and only then start changing things. That gives you a rollback that does not depend on anyone else's backup schedule.

Step 4: Find Email Accounts, in the Email section

The Email category holds Email Accounts, which is where you create a mailbox, set its password, set its quota and get the connection settings for Outlook, Apple Mail or a phone. It also holds Email Disk Usage, which breaks mailbox space down by folder so you can see that six years of Sent Items is the actual problem.

Both tools carry the same risk, and it is the worst one in cPanel for a small business. Deleting an email account deletes the mail still in it, and you cannot get it back. Mail removed through Email Disk Usage is likewise gone permanently. If a mailbox belongs to someone who has left, the order is: connect to it over IMAP and copy the mail somewhere you control, confirm the copy is complete, and only then delete the account. Doing it the other way round is not recoverable by us or by anyone.

Webmail is reached separately from the mailbox itself. Roundcube is the webmail client you will see.

Step 5: Find the Databases section, and leave it alone until you need it

The Databases category contains MySQL Databases and phpMyAdmin. If you are running WordPress or any other application that was installed for you, its database already exists and you do not need to create anything.

When you do need a database from scratch, the outcome you are aiming for is three things: a database, a database user with a password, and that user granted access to that database. You then put those three values into your application's configuration file, which for WordPress is wp-config.php. cPanel prefixes both database names and usernames with your account name, so the name you type is not the full name you enter in the config file. Copy the full name from the list after it is created.

phpMyAdmin is the tool for looking inside a database and running queries. It is genuinely useful and it is also where people destroy sites. Before running anything that changes data, use its export function to download a copy of the database. That export is your undo step. There is no confirmation prompt that will save you from a bad DROP statement.

Step 6: Find the PHP version switcher, in the Software section

The tool you want is MultiPHP Manager, in the Software category. It lists your domains, shows which PHP version each is set to, and shows the server's default under System PHP Version. To change one, you tick the domain, choose a version from the PHP Version drop-down and click Apply.

The common mistake is opening MultiPHP INI Editor instead. That is a different tool, for adjusting individual PHP settings such as memory limits and upload sizes. It will not change your PHP version.

Changing PHP version can take a live site down the moment you click Apply, because an old plugin or theme that was fine on the previous version may fatal on the new one. So: write down the version the domain is currently on before you change it, take a backup, change it, then load the site and the admin area and check them properly. If something breaks, the undo step is to set the version back to the one you noted. That is why you note it first.

Which PHP versions are installed depends on the server. Our cPanel guides cover the version change on its own, and if the version you need is not in the drop-down, open a support ticket.

Step 7: Find the SSL section, in Security

There are two SSL entries and readers conflate them constantly.

SSL/TLS Status is the one you want almost every time. It opens the certificate tool on its Status tab and lists every domain and subdomain on the account with its current certificate state. There is a Run AutoSSL button that forces an immediate AutoSSL run, shows an "AutoSSL is in progress" message and reloads when the run finishes.

SSL/TLS is the other one. It handles certificate signing requests, private keys and manual installation of a certificate you bought elsewhere. Unless you have been sent a certificate file by a third party, you do not need it.

Order of operations decides whether AutoSSL works, and getting it wrong is the most common ticket we see in this area.

1. Point the domain at us first. AutoSSL proves you own the domain by reaching it over HTTP at the hosting account. If the domain still resolves to your old host, verification fails, however many times you press the button. At your registrar, set the nameservers to ns1.serverworld.uk, ns2.serverworld.uk, ns3.serverworld.uk and ns4.serverworld.uk, then wait for that to take effect.
2. Clear any existing certificate. Let's Encrypt certificates will not install over another certificate, including a self-signed or expired one. If a domain shows an old certificate, that has to go first.
3. Check the domain is included. A domain listed with "Include during AutoSSL" switched off will be skipped.
4. Then run AutoSSL and wait for the page to reload.

One background note: since cPanel & WHM v120 the Sectigo AutoSSL provider was disabled, and affected accounts were moved to Let's Encrypt. If an old article tells you to pick Sectigo, it predates that change.

Step 8: Know what you can ignore

The remaining categories are real but rarely urgent for one small site. Domains is where you add another domain, an alias or a subdomain, and since v138 renaming a domain migrates its custom DNS records and subdomains with it rather than requiring you to delete and rebuild. Metrics holds visitor statistics, bandwidth and error logs, and the error log is worth knowing about when something breaks. Everything else in Security, Software and Advanced is there for specific jobs: cron jobs, IP blocking, Node.js and similar. You can safely leave them until you have a reason.

Jupiter lets you drag the categories into a different order. Once you know which four or five you use, move them to the top. It takes a minute and saves scrolling every day thereafter.

What next

The natural next step is pointing your domain at Hostworld, because SSL, email and the site itself all depend on it. That means setting the four serverworld.uk nameservers at whichever registrar holds the domain, then coming back to SSL/TLS Status and running AutoSSL. Our cPanel guides cover the individual tasks click by click, and the web hosting product pages list what is included on each plan.

If you are unsure which cPanel version your account is on, whether a particular optional tool is installed, or which PHP versions are available to you, check the footer for the version and then open a support ticket. Tickets are logged against your account, so the next person who picks it up can see the history.