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The Softaculous WordPress Manager is one of two tools you use to manage WordPress installs. If you search for “wordpress” in cPanel you also see a WordPress Toolkit option. Both offer roughly the same set of features, but for a long time some WordPress Toolkit features were paid-for. That was rather limiting, and we therefore recommended using Softaculous instead. Since cPanel version 100, released in November 2021, the full Toolkit version is included, so you can now use either Softaculous or Toolkit.
One downside of Softaculous is that the interface is a little cluttered. Softaculous can manage hundreds of software packages, including Drupal and Magento. That means that there are a lot of options and that navigating Softaculous isn’t always intuitive. Toolkit has a more modern interface, so you might prefer Toolkit for that reason.
To help you get started with Softaculous, you mainly need the navigation items in the top-right corner:
As said, the WordPress Manager menu shows all existing WordPress installations on your account. There are two buttons at the top of the page:
The Installations section lists all WordPress installs that can be managed via Softaculous. You can expand and collapse each install using the up/down arrows to the right. For instance, the below image shows three WordPress installations on my account. If I want to see the details for any of the domains then I can click on the down arrow to the right of the “Up to date” button. This reveals lots of settings for the selected WordPress install.
One nice feature of the WordPress Manager is that can you log straight into the WordPress dashboard by clicking on Login. And, if you have lost your WordPress password then you can quickly change the password by clicking on Change Password.
As said, expanding a WordPress install reveals lots of settings. I looked at most of the settings in the article about installing WordPress via Softaculous. For instance, I enabled automatic updates for plugins and themes as well as minor updates to WordPress itself. You can also see the website URL and site name below the thumbnail of the website. If you want to change any of the settings, you can do so here.
There are a few other interesting options:
WP_CRON
with a “proper” cron job. Doing so is one of our recommendations in our article about important WordPress tweaks. Replacing the default WordPress cron is particularly useful if your website gets a fair amount of visitors. The cron job Softaculous creates will run every 30 minutes. You can edit the cron job via cPanel’s Cron jobs interface.WP_DEBUG
to true in the website’s wp-config.php file. This can be useful if you are debugging an error. Any PHP warnings and errors will be shown on the website, so you can quickly see which page is triggering what error. Of course, don’t enable this on a production website.There are six options at the bottom of the WordPress Management page:
This article is part of a series of articles about Softaculous and WordPress. The other articles are: