Going live

Before you deploy

	Where
Your domain in `site.url`	`src/content/site.json` — canonical links, share links, `sitemap.xml` and `robots.txt` are built from it
Name, title, description	`src/content/site.json`
Contact details, opening hours, map link	`src/content/site.json`
Browser icons replaced	`public/icon.svg`, `favicon.ico`, `apple-icon.png`
Share image replaced	`public/opengraph-image.png`, and its description (`shareImageAlt`) in `src/layouts/Layout.astro`
Demo text and photos replaced	`src/content/pages/`, `src/content/collections/`, `src/assets/images/`
Forms deliver to you	Forms
Style guide kept or deleted	`src/pages/style-guide.astro`
`npm run check` and `npm run build` pass, `npm run preview` looks right	—

The demo content is there to be replaced: leaving “Nitip”, the London address or the sample case studies on a live site is the most common mistake.

Deploy

npm run build writes a complete static site to dist/: HTML files, one stylesheet, a few small scripts, optimised images. Any host that serves files can run it — no Node.js needed on the server (unless you chose server-mode forms).

Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages (free for most sites)

Push the project to GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.
Import the repository. Astro is detected: build command npm run build, output folder dist.
Add your form variables (PUBLIC_FORM_ENDPOINT, …) in the host’s environment settings, then deploy.
Add your domain in the host’s Domains settings and follow the DNS instructions.

Pages are built as files (about.html) and served at clean addresses (/about). Netlify and Cloudflare Pages do that by default; on Vercel, add a vercel.json next to package.json with { "cleanUrls": true }.

Any other host (shared hosting, S3, a VPS)

npm run build

Upload the contents of dist/ to the web root. For clean addresses, make the server try <path>.html:

Apache (.htaccess):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ $1.html [L]
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

nginx: try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404; and error_page 404 /404.html;

Server-mode forms

If you set PUBLIC_FORM_MODE=server, add your host’s adapter first (npx astro add vercel, netlify, cloudflare or node). Only the form route runs on the server; every page stays static.

After it is live

Check the pages. Click through every page on a phone and a laptop: menu, sliders, accordions, Load More, both forms.
Send yourself a submission from the live site and reply to it.
Verify the share card. Paste your URL into https://www.opengraph.xyz or a chat window and confirm the image and title.
Tell Google. Add the site to Search Console, verify ownership and submit https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. Bing has the same thing in Webmaster Tools.
Analytics, if you want it. Add your snippet to the <head> in src/layouts/Layout.astro, or use your host’s built-in analytics (Vercel Analytics, Cloudflare Web Analytics, Plausible, Fathom) — none of them need a cookie banner.
Keep the content moving. New posts, projects and roles are an entry each in a JSON file; see Editing the content, or connect a CMS (Using a headless CMS) if someone else will publish.

Performance and SEO

The template ships with what search engines look for: static HTML, one <h1> per page, titles and descriptions per page, canonical links, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, share cards, optimised and lazy-loaded images, and a Lighthouse performance score of 100 on the demo. Keeping it there is mostly about images: Astro resizes them, but a 12 MB camera file still slows the build and the first visit — export photos around 2400 px wide.