The dashboard is home base. It's where your sites live, where you connect domains, set up email, check billing, and pull a backup when you need one. This guide is a quick walk through each area so you know where to look before you need it.

Nothing here is complicated, and most of it you can ignore until the day you want it. But it helps to have a map. Once you've launched your first site, this is the room you'll come back to.

Your sites

The sites list is the first thing you'll see. Each site is a card showing its name, its current address, and whether it's up. Click one to open its detail page — the single most useful screen in the whole dashboard.

The detail page gathers everything about one site in one place:

  • Disk usage against your plan's allowance, so you can see at a glance how much room you have left.
  • The site's address — both its instant your-site.cloudperch.io subdomain and any custom domain you've connected. This is also where you'll find the exact DNS records to point a domain at, when you're ready.
  • WordPress admin, with a one-time magic login link if you've misplaced your password.
  • Tools available on your plan — the File Manager for files and databases, on-demand backups, plus SFTP on Perch Pro and up and SSH access on Flock and Aerie.

If you're ever unsure where to do something to a specific site, start at its detail page. Almost every per-site action lives there or one click away.

Domains and DNS

The domains area is where you manage the names that point at your sites. From here you can:

Free SSL provisions itself for every domain once its DNS resolves, so there's no certificate to buy or button to press here.

Email and mailboxes

If your plan includes mailboxes — one on Perch Pro, five on Flock, ten on Aerie — this is where you create and manage them. You can add a you@yourdomain.com address, set its password, and grab the settings for connecting your mail app or for sending email from WordPress.

Set up a mailbox and SMTP covers the whole flow, including the records that keep your mail out of spam folders. Need more addresses than your plan includes? A mailbox pack adds five for $10/mo.

Billing and plan

The billing area shows your current plan, what you're paying, and your invoice history. From here you can:

  • Switch plans up or down. You can start on Roost and grow into Perch Pro, Flock, or Aerie without rebuilding anything.
  • Add or remove add-ons — extra storage at $4/mo per 50GB, a mailbox pack, or priority migration.
  • Update your payment method and download invoices.

Every plan is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, and understanding your plan explains what each tier includes if you're weighing a change.

Backups

Every site is enrolled in daily backups with 30-day retention from the moment it exists — nothing to switch on. The backups area is where you'll go to:

  • Take an on-demand snapshot before a big change, like a theme swap or a plugin update.
  • Restore to an earlier point with one click.

Restore from a backup walks through both, so a bad afternoon stays a small one.

Support and account

Two more areas round things out:

  • Support is where you raise a ticket and track replies. Help comes from real people, Monday to Friday — and faster on Perch Pro and up, where priority support is included. The FAQ and the contact page are always close by too.
  • Account settings holds your profile, password, and notification preferences.

Where to go next

Now that you can find your way around, the common first moves are to give your site a real name and lock in SSL:

If anything looks unfamiliar, the FAQ covers the usual questions, or reach a human from the contact page.