Your website is your business’s home on the web, and like any home, it needs some planning, design, decoration, and furnishing before you move in—or in this case, publish. And similarly, you can either go it alone, using your own skills and tools, or you can bring in the experts.
Publishing a website is more straightforward than most people think. This guide shows you exactly how to choose your publishing method, secure your domain, set up hosting, and launch a beautiful new ecommerce site that’s ready to do business—whether you’re building your first store or your fifth.
How to publish a website
- Decide how you will publish
- Choose your domain name
- Find a web hosting provider
- Create your content
- Build your website
- Test your website
- Publish your website
How you publish a website depends on what kind of site you want to create. A simple news site or company blog can work with one of the free options built for that purpose. For an ecommerce site, choose a platform like Shopify that makes creating and publishing a store easy. If your plans include a complex site with several website developers, your needs will be different again.
Use these steps as your guide:
1. Decide how you will publish
There are different ways to make a website. For example, you might create a custom HTML, use a website builder, or use a template. Here’s how the most common methods work:
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Website building service. Web-building services let you design layouts without touching code. Many of these offer a drag-and-drop interface builder you can use to start designing a layout—even if you have no past experience. Options include the general-purpose website builder Squarespace, which integrates with Shopify, and the Shopify website builder.
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Templates. Templates balance flexibility with ease of use, letting you skip the coding while still creating a unique look. Most cost between $0 and $180 and require no technical knowledge. For example, Shopify has hundreds of themes you can install and then customize. Just pick one that reflects how you want your ecommerce store to look and work, and then tweak it from there. Templates are available for most web hosting services, including WordPress, Tumblr, and Ghost.
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Website code. If you’ve designed and hand-coded your site in HTML, JavaScript, or other scripting languages, you can upload your files directly to your web hosting provider via file transfer protocol (FTP) or secure file transfer protocol (SFTP). This method gives you the maximum amount of control over your website—but you’ll also spend the most time building and maintaining it.
2. Choose your domain name
Your website’s domain name matters for two main reasons. First, your domain—or web address—is your identity on the internet. It’s what people type into a browser, and it’s a part of your official email address. Second, when you own your domain name, you own that identity.
Once you build a site with your own domain, you can move it anywhere, and your customers will come with you. You could change hosting platforms and email providers, and nobody but you will notice. The same can’t be said of an Instagram username, for example.
Most of the good .com domains are already taken. But you have other options: get creative or choose one of the many different domain extensions that exist. These include endings like .shop, .store, and so on. The key is to select a hyper-specific top-level domain (TLD) like this that is professional-looking, catchy, and relevant to your business.
Country-specific TLDs offer another route. In some cases, only businesses in a given country can use a specific TLD; however, other web extensions are open to anyone, such as .io (British Indian Ocean Territory, aka the Chagos Islands), .tv (Tuvalu), or .me (Montenegro). These TLDs can add brand personality—.io became popular with tech startups, while .tv suits media companies.
3. Find a web hosting provider
A web host maintains the servers where your website’s code lives. When someone visits your site, those servers deliver the data to the user’s browser.
If you’re using a full-on web-building service like Shopify, it’s convenient to also host your website with the same service. All you typically need to do is provide the details of your domain and verify that you are the owner.
For WordPress or another all-in-one content management system (CMS), look for a host that lets you deploy with a single click, like Kinsta or NameCheap’s EasyWP. For a very simple site, Tiiny Host lets you drag and drop a single HTML file, or a zipped-up folder of files, into its site to get started. More complex setups work with specialist web hosts, like DreamHost, Bluehost, and Hostinger, that offer multiple tiers of hosting plans increasing in power, flexibility, and reliability.
Some of the most common types of web hosting plans include:
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Shared hosting. This is the least expensive paid option. Your website shares space on a computer in a data center with other sites. The downside is that other users might slow things down if their sites use too many resources.
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Dedicated hosting. For a big ecommerce operation with special needs or a high volume of traffic, a dedicated host like Namecheap gives you more control over what software runs on the server and better security.
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Virtual private server (VPS). Another web hosting option is using a virtual private server (VPS), which dedicates one of several virtual computers running on a shared server. This arrangement is cheaper than dedicated hosting but faster and more secure than shared hosting, making it a good middle-ground option.
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Cloud hosting. If you expect rapid growth or traffic spikes, cloud hosting automatically scales your resources up or down. Your site stays fast during a product launch without paying for excess capacity year-round.
When comparing the best website hosting providers, focus on uptime stats—how often their servers actually stay online. A host with 99.9% uptime sounds impressive until you realize that’s still eight hours of downtime per year. Also look at network performance, scalability, and security features like free SSL certificates (included with Shopify).
4. Create your content
When planning to publish a website, it’s necessary to brainstorm and create your content, which will revolve around your site’s purpose. Ask yourself, what is your website for? Are you selling services or physical goods? Is this a company blog? Are you publishing articles and how-tos to drive traffic to your store? For example, the website of coffee grinder company Baratza is home to not only its ecommerce store but also repair guides and embedded YouTube videos about troubleshooting the product.
While brainstorming content ideas, build in search engine optimization (SEO) from the beginning. An SEO marketing strategy helps your website rank high in Google’s search results, which translates to more traffic and more potential customers finding your store. SEO involves incorporating keywords into your content; updating your blog often with high-quality, relevant articles on related topics; using a mobile-ready theme; and ensuring your page designs have logical internal links, menus, and a sitemap.
5. Build your website
If you’re using a template or theme with WordPress or Shopify, this stage is where you do the most work. Write articles and product copy, upload photos, and tweak your layout, typography, and everything else involved in designing a website.
A highly flexible template means you won’t need to hire a developer every time you want to change your homepage layout or add a seasonal banner—changes you can make yourself in minutes instead of days. Look for one that includes custom layout tools, fonts, and settings for both desktop and mobile.
Consider hiring a user experience designer, or UX designer, to help with this part of the website publishing process. Their job is to ensure your website is user-friendly and easy to navigate for visitors and shoppers, which directly affects whether people complete purchases or bounce from your site.
6. Test your website
Test your website multiple times after you’ve uploaded all the materials but before you publish it. The goal is to eliminate any and all bugs, typos, or bad links. Imagine your visitors clicking on a link to contact you and then receiving a “Page not found” message—this wouldn’t inspire much confidence in your brand.
If you’re running an ecommerce site, place test orders and run through all the scenarios you can think of—paste in malformed phone numbers, check your returns process, and so on. If you’re using Shopify, the platform performs many of these checks on your behalf, but it never hurts to test things anyway for your peace of mind.
Finally, test any accessibility features. This includes translations, alt text for images, and alternatives to CAPTCHAs for users with impaired vision. A broken checkout link could mean hours of lost sales before you notice—testing catches these issues when fixing them is still easy.
7. Publish your website
Publishing your website can be as easy as hitting the Publish button on a dedicated provider, or as involved as uploading your raw HTML files, images, and folders via SFTP to a web host.
Shopify is designed to make building an ecommerce site easy, so once you have everything ready, launching the site is as easy as choosing a plan. WordPress is a little more complicated. Since it’s a blogging engine at heart, you’ve likely chosen WordPress because you’re planning on regularly updating your site. In this case, publishing will be ongoing—you’ll push every new post live as it’s ready or schedule it to publish automatically.
Alternatively, you will publish your site via FTP or SFTP. With this method of publishing, you log in to and access a remote server, then view it like a folder on your computer. You can drag and drop the files you need to upload and rearrange them. You may be able to connect to a remote FTP server using the file browser on your computer, but you’re better off using the FTP tools built into your coding software of choice or a dedicated app like Transmit 5.
How to publish a website FAQ
How do I publish my own website?
Depending on what you want to achieve, publishing a website can be as easy as starting a free Tumblr, writing a post on a WordPress blog, or customizing a Shopify template. Or it can be as involved as hiring a web developer, a UX designer, and a team of content producers.
Can you publish a website for free?
Yes, you can publish a website for free. You can host simple pages out of a Dropbox, GitHub, or WordPress account, or you can use your email provider. All of these options are free, even with a custom domain. As your needs grow, you might need to pay for a hosting platform to handle more traffic, guarantee reliability, and support more complex features.
How much does it cost to publish a website?
You can do a lot for free, but if you need professional-level support and features, the cost ranges from the double digits to thousands of dollars per month. At the very least, you should invest in your own domain name, which starts at less than $10 per year.
