What is the Web Root Folder and Site Root Folder?

The web root is the folder where the website files for a site are stored. Each site under your host gets a unique root folder.

The root folder is placed under the site’s username, this is the home directory. Inside you’ll find folders like ~/logs, ~/public, ~/private and more environmental files for your site’s username.

Site Root Folder

The most important folder is the ~/public folder as this contains your actual site. In other words, your site root folder is the same as the ~/public folder in your web root. This is where you are supposed to place all the files you want accessible from the internet. In other words, this is where you’ll find your CMS files.

At your top-right here, you’ll find an example of what your site root could look like when you have WordPress installed, for instance. But in reality, this could be any other collection of files and folders from another CMS.

If you have any files you do not want accessible from the internet for storage or otherwise, you should store them in the ~/private folder.

Web Root Directory

The Web Root Directory is the path of the location of your Site Root folder. You can find this information in the Server Login Information tab per site in the Control Panel. It’s listed at the bottom under the Web root directory. You’ll need this information, for instance, when you’re adding cron jobs to WordPress or WooCommerce.

Log files

Inside your home directory (cd $home), you’ll find a ~/logs folder that contains various log files. Learn more about the ErrorLog file and the AccessLog files inside that folder.