1. Login into cPanel.
2. 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.
3. Click on New File, an icon found in the toolbar at the top of the page.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Now that you have created the page, you need to set the file name as your default for your website. In order to do this you should create .htaccess file in the same directory the same way how you have created comingsoon.html in steps 3 and 4.
8. Once the file is created, right click on it and select Edit.
9. You are now in the htaccess editor. Paste the following code at the top of the page to configure your desired index page. In our example below, we decided to make the index page of our folders named comingsoon.html:
#Alternate default index page
DirectoryIndex comingsoon.html
You can also list more than one file in the configuration. The file will be read left to right and check for them in that order. In this example, we add index.htm, index.html, and index.php to the list. First the server will check for comingsoon.html, if it does not find a file with that name, it continues to index.htm and so on.
#Alternate default index pages
DirectoryIndex first.html index.htm index.html index.php
10. Be sure to hit the Save Changes button in the upper right corner to save your new htaccess configuration.
