PageMotor Setup Guide

Installing PageMotor on GoDaddy

A plain-English walkthrough for GoDaddy's cPanel Web Hosting. About ten minutes, and you do not need to be technical.

⏱ ~10 minutes 🧰 No coding 🖥 Needs the cPanel hosting plan

First, check you have the right GoDaddy product. PageMotor needs GoDaddy's Linux Web Hosting plan, the one whose hosting dashboard shows a cPanel Admin button. Two popular GoDaddy products cannot run PageMotor at all: Websites + Marketing (the site builder) and Managed WordPress, because neither gives you cPanel or file access.

Before you start, have these ready: your GoDaddy Web Hosting account, the PageMotor files (the .zip you downloaded), and the name of your website. That is everything.

Not on GoDaddy? Everything in this guide is standard cPanel, so the steps are nearly identical on any cPanel host. We also have this guide for Bluehost and HostGator, and a different one for SiteGround (which does not use cPanel).

Use this guide with any AI assistant

Download it as a prompt file, paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or any LLM, and it will walk you through every step interactively.

Download as LLM prompt

1Put PageMotor on your site

Open cPanel: sign in at godaddy.com and open My Products. Next to your Web Hosting plan choose Manage, then click cPanel Admin on the hosting dashboard. (If the dashboard looks different, a reliable fallback: go to yourdomain.com/cpanel and sign in with your cPanel username and password, which you can view or reset under the hosting dashboard's Settings.)
In cPanel, click File Manager and open the folder for your site. For your main domain it is public_html. (Installing on a second, addon domain? Use the folder shown as that domain's Document Root under cPanel → Domains instead.)
Click Upload, choose your PageMotor .zip, and wait for it to finish.
Back in File Manager, right-click the uploaded zip and choose Extract. (If Extract stalls partway, just run it again; GoDaddy's shared servers sometimes pause big jobs, and a retry normally finishes it.)

cPanel Tools page showing Email, File Manager and Databases sections — cPanel's Tools page. File Manager is under the Files section; the MySQL Database Wizard is under Databases.

cPanel File Manager showing public_html directory ready for upload — Navigate to public_html in File Manager, then click Upload to add your PageMotor .zip file.

When it is done you should see pagemotor.php, a lib folder, and a file called config-sample.php sitting in your site folder. (If extracting gave you a single folder called pagemotor instead, open it, select everything inside, choose Move and move it all into your site folder, then delete the empty folder and the zip.) Good. We use that sample file in step 3.

2Create your database

PageMotor keeps your content in a database. GoDaddy's cPanel has a wizard that does the whole job in one pass.

In cPanel, open the MySQL Database Wizard (under the Databases section).
Name the database. Pick something distinctive like yoursite_pagemotor: GoDaddy needs the name to be unique across their whole system, so a plain name like pagemotor may already be taken.
Create the database user. Let the password generator make a strong password, and write it down now.
On the privileges screen, tick ALL PRIVILEGES and finish the wizard.

MySQL Database Wizard Step 1 — Create A Database — The MySQL Database Wizard. Enter a name for your database and click Next Step.

One GoDaddy difference from other hosts: GoDaddy usually shows the database name exactly as you typed it, with no automatic prefix. If your screen does add a prefix (a box showing accountname_ before the name), then the full prefixed name is the real one. Either way, copy the final database name and username exactly as cPanel shows them at the end of the wizard. You will need those two plus the password in the next step.

3Fill in config.php

This is the file that connects PageMotor to the database you just made.

On current PageMotor releases there is an easier way. From 0.11 the Install Wizard does this step for you: skip straight to yoursite.com/admin/ in your browser and it asks for the three database values and writes config.php itself. If the wizard appears, use it and jump to step 4. The hand-edit below still works on every release.

In File Manager, find config-sample.php next to pagemotor.php.
Right-click it and choose Rename. Rename it to exactly config.php. This rename is the step that switches PageMotor on.
Right-click config.php and choose Edit.
Put your three values into DB_NAME, DB_USER and DB_PASSWORD, exactly as the wizard showed them. Leave the rest as they are, then Save.

Here is what the database section of your config.php should look like once filled in. Edit the existing lines to match; you are changing three values, not pasting this block in:

// Database connection info:
define('DB_NAME', 'yoursite_pagemotor');    // exact name from the wizard
define('DB_USER', 'yoursite_pmuser');       // exact username from the wizard
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'your-strong-password');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');            // correct for GoDaddy's cPanel hosting
define('DB_CHARSET', '');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
define('DB_TABLE_PREFIX', 'pm_');
define('DB_FLAGS', '');
define('PM_HTML_CHARSET', '');

Two things to double-check: the file must be named exactly config.php (not config-sample.php, and not config.php.txt), and it must sit in the same folder as pagemotor.php.

4Finish in your browser

Go straight to yoursite.com/admin/ first. On this first visit PageMotor sets up its content and walks you into creating your admin user. Make the admin the first page you open on a brand-new install; current releases expect it, and it never hurts on older ones.
Then visit your website to see the front of the site.

That is it. You are in, and you can start building pages.

Sending email on GoDaddy

Email is the one place GoDaddy genuinely differs from other hosts, so it is worth two minutes now. Contact forms, sign-ups and password resets all need a way to send mail.

Read this first GoDaddy shared hosting blocks outbound SMTP to outside mail services. Mailgun, SendGrid, Brevo and the like will simply time out, on every port, because GoDaddy firewalls them as a matter of policy. This is not a setting you can change. So the advice you will see elsewhere, "just point it at Mailgun", does not work here. What does work is GoDaddy's own mail system.

The setup that works on GoDaddy: send through the server's own local mail system.

In your mail plugin (EP Email, for example), set the transport to the local mail server: SMTP Host localhost, Port 25, Encryption none, Authentication none. There is no username or password, because the server trusts mail sent from itself.
Or, even simpler, choose the PHP mail() transport if your plugin offers it. It uses that same local mail system with nothing to configure.
Send a test email to yourself. A local connection succeeds where the outside services timed out.

EP Email test result on GoDaddy: SMTP connection successful and test email sent, with a heads-up that Gmail will reject it because the domain is missing DKIM — The real thing on GoDaddy with host `localhost`: Test Connection passes and the email sends. Watch EP Email's own heads-up appear: the message is “sent”, but without DKIM, Gmail will silently drop it. That is the next thing to fix.

"Sent" is not the same as "delivered". Your GoDaddy box will happily report the mail as sent, but Gmail and Outlook quietly bin messages from a domain with no SPF and DKIM records. The mail does not bounce; it just disappears. Add those two DNS records for your domain and real inboxes will accept it. The DNS half of the Mailgun guide shows exactly what they look like.

🚀 Want a proper external service like Mailgun, with the best possible deliverability? You need a host that does not block the SMTP ports. That means a small VPS rather than shared hosting. Our Hosting PageMotor on Vultr guide takes you from empty box to live, with Mailgun working normally.

Connecting Claude from this host

PageMotor speaks MCP natively, so once your site is up you can connect Claude Code or Claude.ai to it and let Claude build pages, manage content and run plugins for you. The connection asks a little more of a host than serving pages does. Four things must be true: the Authorization header must reach PHP intact, PageMotor must be allowed to answer its dynamic /.well-known/ routes itself, PHP's clock must be on UTC, and nothing may redirect Claude's POST to /mcp (the trailing-slash trap).

You do not need to test any of that by hand. Install EP Host Check and read its MCP / Claude connection rows: since v1.2.0 its five checks cover all of this from your admin panel, no working Claude connection required, each with a plain fix. If a row fails, or the connection misbehaves anyway, the MCP troubleshooting guide has the exact diagnostic and fix for every verified cause.

The usual offender on shared hosting is the first item: Apache running PHP as FastCGI drops the Authorization header before PHP ever sees it. The fix is one line in your .htaccess, ready to paste in section 6 of the troubleshooting guide.

If something is not working

Open these only if you hit them. Each one is quick.

I see "HTTP ERROR 500" or a blank white page

most commonAlmost always a config.php problem. Check three things:

The file is named exactly config.php (not still config-sample.php, and not config.php.txt).
It is in the same folder as pagemotor.php.
To see the real reason, open cPanel → Metrics → Errors. (On GoDaddy an error_log file does not appear in your site folder by itself, so Metrics → Errors is the place to look. If you need fuller PHP logging, GoDaddy's help article "Set up PHP error logging" shows how to switch it on.) If it says config.php "No such file or directory", this is your fix.

The log says "MySQLi Connection Error"

Good news, that means config.php is now working and PageMotor reached the database step. It just could not log in. Re-check, against the exact names the wizard showed:

The database name and username are copied exactly, including any prefix if your screen showed one.
The password is correct.
The user has ALL PRIVILEGES on the database (the wizard's last screen; you can re-check under cPanel → MySQL Databases).
Ignore old tutorials telling you to hunt for a special GoDaddy MySQL host name. That advice is for their long-retired legacy hosting; on today's cPanel hosting it is simply localhost.

I changed my PHP version and nothing changed

The PHP version is rarely the cause. A missing or misnamed config.php fails the same way on every version, so changing it makes no difference. Sort the config.php first. PageMotor is happy on modern PHP 8.x, and GoDaddy's current default is PHP 8.3. (On GoDaddy you can change the version from the hosting dashboard's Settings tab as well as inside cPanel.)

I cannot find config-sample.php

It ships inside the PageMotor download, right next to pagemotor.php. Two things to check: the files may have landed in a pagemotor subfolder when the zip extracted, in which case move everything in it up into your site folder (see the note in step 1); and if the folder is genuinely empty, the zip did not extract completely, so repeat step 1.

My SMTP email test "times out" (Mailgun, SendGrid, Brevo and the like)

GoDaddy-specific If a test connection to an outside mail service times out on port 587 and 465 (rather than rejecting your password), the cause is almost never your settings. GoDaddy blocks outbound SMTP to external mail servers on its shared cPanel hosting, as a matter of policy, and routes mail only through its own relay. A timeout, not a login error, is the giveaway: the connection never reaches the provider.

Your options on GoDaddy shared hosting:

Use the server's own mail system. Set your mail host to localhost on port 25 with no authentication and no encryption (or pick the PHP mail() transport, which does the same with nothing to configure). This is the reliable GoDaddy path, covered in full under Sending email on GoDaddy above. Remember to add SPF and DKIM for your domain, or Gmail will silently drop the mail.
Move to a VPS. On any VPS the SMTP ports are open and an external service like Mailgun works normally, with proper SPF/DKIM and real inbox placement. See Hosting PageMotor on Vultr.

(One older GoDaddy relay hostname, relay-hosting.secureserver.net, is widely quoted online but is now deprecated and tends to time out; use localhost instead.) This is the one real limit of GoDaddy shared hosting for a PageMotor site. Everything else in this guide works fine; only external SMTP is walled off.

📧 Will your site send email? Contact forms, sign-ups and password resets need a proper mail service or they land in spam. Follow the companion guide: Set up reliable email with Mailgun. On GoDaddy shared hosting note the SMTP limit above: external services are blocked, so you will use GoDaddy's relay or a VPS.