New SiteGround Control Panel Tour

Take a tour of the new control panel at SiteGround as of August 2019.

This tour does not include every aspect of the panel, but it will help familiarize you with how to get to the basic functions you use the most.

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ALSO READ: SiteGround Morphing into Pseudo Managed Hosting

Take the Tour

A transcript is below the video too.

Transcript

Below is a quick reference of where to locate tools in the new interface.

The My Account Page

Once you log in to SiteGround, you’ll land on the My Account page. It has a tips section and below that, a section with the latest blog posts.

To access the site’s control panel, click the Websites tab at the top.

Then for the domain, on the far right, click the Site Tools button.

If you have more than one site in the control panel, each one of them now has its own Site Tools interface.

There is no such thing as add on domains anymore.

Site

The most common tools pinned to the top such as File Manager.

To access the full set of tools, click the hamburger menu in the far top left.

Then click Site.

Here you will find:

• File Manager
• FTP Accounts
• MySQL for the database

Security

This tab contains HTTPS related settings for the SSL Manager for the certificates and the HTTPS Enforce redirect option, which is off by default.

Speed

This tab contains the host’s Cloudflare interface as well as their server-side caching options, which are on by default.

WordPress

This tab has the Staging site setup as well as the Migrator you will need to clone the site.

Domain

This tab has your sub-domains. Recall I mentioned that there are no longer any add on domains as each site has its own Site Tools and the entire setup structure is different from cPanel.

You also have your redirect interface here.

And this is where you can access the DNS Zone Editor. That includes the TXT and MX records for setting up email accounts.

Email

This tab has all of the links for host-related email setup.

Statistics

This tab has links for Traffic which will show quite a bit about the traffic to your site and your bandwidth use.

It also has your system error log.

The access log is the raw log file of what has hit your site. There is no indication of what timeframe it covers.

Devs

This tab has your cron jobs, your PHP manager, and the SSH Keys manager.

The PHP manager has your version level settings and the variables that go with it.

Dashboard and Misc

To collapse this sidebar pop out, click the Dashboard tab.

And to return all the way back to the home page, click the Go to My Account tab.

Click your Account initials to access your logout link.

What’s Hard to Work With

SiteGround has been working toward making it super easy for non-techie DIY site owners to easily do most functions with site tools. However, that same automation creates other issues that make it tougher for webmasters like me to help clients. And the automated way of doing some of those things is most definitely not better, especially for security. It actually takes me longer to set up a site from scratch on SiteGround than it does to do the same things in cPanel.

The file manager area is a tricky pain to work with and it is very difficult to deal with the lack of file highlighting and such too. I hope they give that a few serious improvement tweaks in the near future.

Also, there are millions of tutorials for doing things on cPanel, especially from 3^rd party vendors, and there is no direct translation for how to do those same things in this complete custom design interface. SiteGround has made their own tutorials, so it’s likely you’ll have to watch 2 sets of tutorials to translate how to do things the new SiteGround way.

I’ve made all new tutorials for my Webmaster Training courses to help designers do common tasks in this new interface.

What’s Missing

The big things missing from this new interface are the hosting resource meters that tell you about CPU, Memory, and I/O usage over time. There is a graph somewhere in your account that gives you a snapshot of the last 24 hours. But, without those meters over time, it will be hard to track down plugins gone wild or security holes. These missing meters not only leave someone like me blind to help you with resource overages, even the host can’t help you with them, as they have nothing to go on either.  And with the hard ceilings that SiteGround enforces in its container hosting setup, that is a real problem.

The Statistics info is a parser they built that they say is similar to AWStats. That data is also critical to seeing what is actually hitting your site, including bad bots, none of which Google Analytics shows you. I don’t have any traffic on this test account to see if what they show will be as useful as AWStats or not, or what timeframe it covers.

That’s it!

Feel free to poke around and get familiar with the new SiteGround interface.

And be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more helpful tips and resources.