Getting your site live

Option A · Included with the £125 package

Do it yourself

A short walk-through for someone who is not a web designer. If you get stuck, get in touch and I will help.

1. Buy a .co.uk domain in your own name, typically around £5 a year. Porkbun is usually cheaper to keep; 123 Reg is a UK firm that bills in pounds. Use your own details and card, and turn on auto-renew. You do not need the registrar’s web hosting if you use the free hosts below.
2. Create a free hosting account in your own name, with your own email, at Cloudflare Pages or Netlify. Either will host a small site at no charge.
3. Upload the folder we send you. If it arrived as a zip file, unzip it first so you can see index.html.
   • On Netlify, sign in, go to app.netlify.com/drop (or the drop area on your Projects page) and drop the folder. You will get a temporary netlify.app address.
   • On Cloudflare, open Workers & Pages, then Create application, Get started, and Drag and drop your files. Name the project, drop the folder (or a zip), and deploy. The site will be at your-project.pages.dev. Official limits are 1,000 files and 25 MiB each — a site like this is well within that.
4. Make sure the world can see it. New Netlify teams created on or after 28 July 2026 often start private, so the temporary address may only work for you. In the project go to Project configuration, General, Visitor access, Project visibility, and choose Make public.
5. Connect your domain. Both hosts issue a free HTTPS certificate once the domain is pointed at them — look for the padlock. DNS can take a few minutes, sometimes up to a day.
   • Cloudflare Pages: open the project, Custom domains, then Set up a domain. For the bare name (for example yourname.co.uk), add the domain as a zone on the same Cloudflare account and point the registrar’s nameservers at Cloudflare — it then creates the record for you. For www, add a CNAME at your registrar pointing to your-project.pages.dev, but only after you have added the domain in the Pages dashboard, or you may see a 522 error. If DNSSEC is on at the registrar, turn it off before changing nameservers, or the domain can stop working.
   • Netlify: open Domain management and add the custom domain. Change the nameservers to Netlify DNS, or add the records it shows you (often an A record for the bare domain to 75.2.60.5, and a CNAME for www to your netlify.app address).
   • If you already use the domain for email, copy any existing mail (MX) records before changing nameservers, or mail will break.
6. Test the contact form. The HTML already has a form. Create a free form account in your own name (Web3Forms or Formspree), paste the key or address into the marked placeholder, and send yourself a test message.
7. Tell Google about the site. Open Google Search Console, add the site, and prove you own it with a DNS text record or the small file Google gives you. Then request indexing of the home page. If you have a service area or premises, also claim a Google Business Profile and add the new website.

Checked against official Cloudflare Pages and Netlify docs in November 2026. Buttons can move; if something looks different, the in-product help or a message to me will sort it out.