When building a website, you may not want random visitors snooping your pages until you are ready for them. Even while some programs allow you to build your site on your local computer and then publish when you are finished, you still may want to test your site on the live server before opening to the public. In this case, you may want to place an "Under Construction" or "Coming Soon" page in place. You can accomplish this in your cPanel.
How to create a custom Under Construction/Coming Soon page
The problem lies with how your hosting server looks for the first page of your site, also called the index page. The server looks for pages that are named index.htm, index.html, index.php, and default.htm, in that order. If it finds a file with one of those names, it places that as the landing page of your website. Website design programs most often create an index.html or index.php page. When publishing your site, even for testing, it is likely that the first page will begin to display to the public. This article will guide you on how to create and set up a placeholder page so that you can work on your site in the background.
- Log into cPanel.
- Enter the File Manager. Be sure to navigate to the root folder for the domain you are working with. If it is the primary domain, use public_html.
- Click on New File, found in the left-hand side of the toolbar at the top of the page.
- Next, give the file a name. Our example will be named comingsoon.html. Click on the Create New File button to complete its creation. Note this simply creates an empty file.
- Now we need to edit the empty file. Highlight the filename and then click on HTML Editor. This allows you to create the page visually, no coding needed. You can make it as fancy or simple as you wish. In our example we will make it very simple.
- Once you have designed your page, click on the Save button in the upper left of the tool bar. It appears as a floppy disk.
- Now that you have created the page, you need to set the filename as your default for your website. Those instructions are found in our article on How to change your default index page in .htaccess.
