Once your website has been designed and signed off, your website design company will get in touch to tell you it is ready to ‘go live’ or be ‘launched’ (these mean the same thing).
Going live with your new website basically means, transferring or uploading it to its permanent location, usually your business domain name.
The process is usually straight forward and broken down into the following steps:
1. A couple of initial questions
Your website design agency will ask you where you want the website to be hosted, they will usually offer two options, either to host it on their own hosting (this is what we offer to all of our customers) or if you have a preferred hosting company to use, they will ask you to supply your login details to your account.
2. Downloading and uploading the website files
After you have established how your new website will be hosted, they will start the process of downloading all of the website files and database from the temporary location, and upload them to the new hosting account where the website will be stored. Depending on the size of your website, this could take some time.
3. Adding the database and configuring
After the website files are adding to the permanent location, your website designers will add the database to the server. The database is the brains of the website and stores all of the information for your website. As the location of the website has change, your Agency will need to login and change some settings and files for it to work on your new domain name. Have no fear if there is a little bit of downtime during this process, it’s completely normal and it won’t last long.
4. Linking it to your domain name
Fantastic, all the files and the database are now all in the right places and the website has been configured, now all that is left to do is link it, so that when someone visits your domain, they will see your new website. This can be done a few ways, based on how your website and domains are hosted.
- Website and Domain are with the same hosting company – During the setup process they should automatically link, this is usually a quick process. We always tell our clients that it should only take a few hours to be fully working.
- Website and Domain are with different hosting companies – Sometimes we find that a client domain name may with hosted with one company (e.g GoDaddy) and their hosting will be somewhere else (e.g like us, or Fasthosts), when this happens, you need to change some records on the DNS, this is a slower process and we always asked our clients to allow up to 48 hours for their websites to be fully operational.
5. Your website is LIVE!
With the domain and hosting all setup, and your website files all migrated, your website will be live and you should be able to see it correctly on your desired domain name. Don’t forget to setup your professional email address and think about looking at ongoing SEO. Search Engine Optimisation is vital for any new website as it will help you rank better on Google to improve its visibility.
We can help you with this. So get in touch if you have any questions.
