Questions about cPanel and CMS

[breighty7]

Hey guys I'm pretty new to all of this. I just signed up for a web hosting service and I've been trying to familiarize myself with cPanel. I'm trying to create a Wordpress site to keep track of what I'm learning while studying coding. I'm just unclear about a few things. 1. From what I can tell when you're using a cms such as wordpress, there are a lot of built in features. You can upload and download files directly to and from your wordpress site. If I decide to just use wordpress sites, how important would using ftp be in cPanel? Would I have to sign up with some sort of Filezilla? Basically, should I learn ftp? 2. Again with cPanel, there's an SEO marketing area. If I change any of the settings and configure seo there through cPanel, would it effect the seo of my wordpress site? Basically, can everything be handled through the cms that can be handled in cPanel? In what situations would one use a lot of the cPanel features in?

[justsomeguy]

With FTP, there's not really anything to learn. FTP is just how you copy files to and from a server, you don't really "learn" FTP any more than you "learn" a web browser. I prefer to use Filezilla to transfer files, but if you would rather use the built-in tools in cPanel or something in Wordpress then that should be fine. If you're uploading images and things that you're going to use in Wordpress then you probably want to upload those through Wordpress, it may make links in a database or something that wouldn't happen if you just uploaded them through FTP. If you have a lot of files to move though then using a standalone FTP client like Filezilla makes the most sense to me.

2. Again with cPanel, there's an SEO marketing area. If I change any of the settings and configure seo there through cPanel, would it effect the seo of my wordpress site?

I'm sure it would affect your site, it's hard to say how any given option would affect it though. We don't need SEO where I work so none of our clients' cPanel accounts that we set up have any SEO plugins installed to manage anything like that, so I'm not sure what you're seeing there.

Basically, can everything be handled through the cms that can be handled in cPanel?

No, at least not in terms of managing the actual server. With cPanel you can do things like add or delete email accounts and databases that Wordpress doesn't have anything to do with. cPanel is for you to manage your hosting account, Wordpress is for you to manage your web site. The web site is just one aspect of the hosting account. Once you have your hosting account set up like you want then you'll typically only manage your web site through Wordpress, you would only need to go back to cPanel if you need to add another email account or something like that.

[breighty7]

No, at least not in terms of managing the actual server. With cPanel you can do things like add or delete email accounts and databases that Wordpress doesn't have anything to do with. cPanel is for you to manage your hosting account, Wordpress is for you to manage your web site. The web site is just one aspect of the hosting account. Once you have your hosting account set up like you want then you'll typically only manage your web site through Wordpress, you would only need to go back to cPanel if you need to add another email account or something like that.

Thank you so much for clarifying this for me! This really simplified it!