OnlineByTonight
Downloaded your files?
Here's exactly what to do next.
Six steps between that zip file sitting in your downloads folder and a real website with your name on it. None of it requires knowing how to code.
Unzip it and take a look
Inside is an index.html file plus a few folders — css, js, images. Double-click index.html and it opens right in your browser, exactly as it'll look live. This is your actual website — real files, not a locked export.
Get a domain name
A domain is the yourbusiness.com part. Any registrar works — Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, whatever you find. Usually $10–20/year. If you already own one from years ago, you can reuse it.
Get basic web hosting
Hosting is the computer that actually serves your site to visitors. Since your files are plain HTML/CSS/JS — no database, no PHP — the cheapest "shared hosting" plan from anywhere works fine. A lot of registrars bundle a hosting plan right into the domain purchase.
Upload your files
Your host gives you either an FTP login or a "File Manager" in their control panel. Upload everything from the unzipped folder so index.html sits right at the top level — not buried inside a subfolder.
Point your domain at your host
This is the one step that varies the most — your host will give you nameservers or DNS records to plug into your registrar. It sounds scarier than it is; every host has a support article (or a real person) that walks you through the exact values for their system.
Tell Google you exist
A website nobody can find doesn't ring the phone. This is the part most DIY sites skip entirely — and it's deep enough that it deserves its own section below.
Three tags that actually matter — and the part that matters more.
Open your index.html in any text editor and here's what to look for:
The <h1> is the biggest, most important heading on the page — the first thing both a visitor and Google use to figure out what you actually do. If yours just reads something punchy like "Built to outlast the storm" with no mention of your trade or your city anywhere near it, that's often the single biggest fixable thing on the whole page.
This isn't visible on the page at all — it's the blue clickable headline Google shows in search results, and what shows in your browser tab. It's a completely separate line from your H1 (the <title> tag, up in the <head>), and a lot of DIY sites leave it as something generic. A good one is specific: business name, what you do, your city — kept under about 60 characters, or Google just cuts it off with "…"
The gray summary line under your title in search results (the <meta name="description"> tag). It doesn't move your ranking up or down directly — but it's your one shot at convincing someone to click your result instead of the one above it. A real sentence about what you do and why to call beats something vague, every time. Aim for around 150–155 characters before it truncates.
And that's just the tags living in your own HTML. The stuff that actually moves the needle after that gets deep fast: does your business have a Google Business Profile — that map pack with the pin, hours, and reviews? Do any other real websites link back to yours? Does your site load fast on a phone with one bar of signal in a work truck? Have you actually submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console, or is it just hoping to get found on its own? Every one of those matters more than people expect, and every single one is a rabbit hole of its own.
Or — skip all of it and let us handle it.
$5/mo (+$15 once) or $50/year. We get your site submitted to Google, keep an eye on it, and you go back to actually running your business instead of reading about meta tags.
See what Pro includes