Publish via cPanel File Manager

If your hosting provider gives you a cPanel dashboard (most shared hosts do — GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostinger, SiteGround, Namecheap, and many others), you can publish your Site Designer project without any FTP software. You export your site to a folder, then upload it through cPanel’s browser-based File Manager.

Prerequisites

• A hosting account with a cPanel control panel.
• Your site exported to a folder — see Export to a folder first. The rest of this article assumes you have that folder ready.

Upload your site with the File Manager

1. Log in to cPanel

   Sign in to your hosting account and open the cPanel dashboard. Some hosts link to it directly from the account home page; others send you to yourdomain.com/cpanel.

2. Open File Manager

   Under the Files section, click File Manager. A new tab opens showing your server’s file tree.

3. Navigate to your web root

   Open the public_html folder — this is the root directory your domain serves from. (On a few hosts the root is named www, htdocs, or httpdocs; use whichever your host documents as the web root.)

4. Choose how to upload

   You can upload the individual files and folders from your export, or compress the export folder into a single .zip and upload that. The zip approach is faster for anything larger than a handful of files.

5. Upload the files

   Click Upload in the File Manager toolbar and select your files. If you’re going the zip route, upload the .zip file into public_html.

6. Extract the zip (if you used one)

   Select the uploaded .zip file in the File Manager, click Extract in the toolbar, and confirm. cPanel decompresses the archive in place. Make sure the extracted files — including index.html — end up directly inside public_html, not in a nested subfolder.

7. Open your live site

   Visit your domain in the browser. Your Site Designer site is now live.

Making sure files land in the right place

The most common cPanel mistake is placing index.html one level too deep. After extracting, your public_html should contain index.html, style.css, and your /images/, /fonts/, and /videos/ folders directly — not another folder that contains them.

If you see a structure like public_html/mysite/index.html, move the contents of mysite/ up one level into public_html, or point your domain’s document root at the mysite/ folder in cPanel.

Updating a published site

To push changes after your first publish:

1. Make your edits in Site Designer.
2. Export again to the same folder (this overwrites the previous files).
3. Re-upload the changed files — or the whole .zip again — through the File Manager.

For small updates, uploading just the files that changed is faster than re-uploading everything.

Troubleshooting cPanel uploads