"... and it is serving my website fine."
Why are you satisfied with "fine"? Would you not prefer optimum performance? Without knowing more about your site, I cannot say for sure; but Nginx might be a better option (box, Netflix, SoundCloud, Facebook, hulu, Zappos, Groupon, Zynga, Intel, Eventbrite, WordPress, Dropbox, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare have all dumped Apache in favor of Nginx). In July 2013, Nginx became the most-used web server among the top 1000 web sites.
"... I want to be able to manage it more effectively..."
Who told you that ZPanel is the answer? A cursory review of the DigitalOcean support threads shows that A LOT of people struggle with ZPanel (and many times, even with the most elementary of functions, i.e. DNS records).
"... and I wouldn't be confident with transferring the databases for the website..."
Then NO control panel is for you, my friend. As Kamal duly noted: Why add yet another layer of complexity to your web server?
"I guess the question really is, what is the best way to go about this?"
Read more DigitalOcean guides. Also, there are TONS of (free) video tutorials on YouTube to help you learn more about Linux (I subscribe to the
Eli the Computer Guy channel).
Stick with the command line. Control Panels' true purpose is to simply provide a graphical user interface (GUI) to administrative functions. But, you still have to (or should) know exactly what those underlying control-panel-functions are doing and what the end result will be.