cPanel is a web hosting control panel software that facilitates the management of a web hosting server used by many companies worldwide. At WordPress.com, we do not use cPanel, rather, we have a custom-designed control panel to improve the experience of using different features, and it includes everything a web developer would need to manage their website. There can be differences with cPanel as WordPress.com is a managed web hosting provider.
This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Creator or Entrepreneur plan. If your site has one of our legacy plans, it is available on the Pro plan.
These are just some features available for your WordPress.com website. You can find more information about different features from the Hosting category on this support site and access various features via the Hosting Configuration page. If you are unsure if your site has a feature or some functionality you need, contact a Happiness Engineer for help.
SSH, or Secure Shell, is a protocol that allows you to connect to services such as web servers. This lets you connect to our servers and manage your WordPress.com website via command-line tools such as WP-CLI.
Check out our complete guide on SSH.
SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol (or SSH File Transfer Protocol) and is a way to access the files and folders on a website via a client program on your local computer.
Learn more about using SFTP on WordPress.com.
phpMyAdmin allows direct access to your site’s database. This is an advanced feature; accessing your database is not required for your site to function.
For more information, visit our phpMyAdmin and MySQL guide.
Information regarding our server setup can be found in the PHP Environment support article.
