Publishing and exporting

The live address

Every site has a working address from the moment it is built. Nothing has to be published, switched on or paid for first — it is already there, and anybody you send it to can open it with no account.

For most people this is the whole answer. The address is what goes on the van, the card and the end of a phone call, and the dashboard behind it is what turns it into something you check on a Monday.

Tip. Send it to one person who has never seen the site and watch which page they land on. It is rarely the one you spent longest on.

Taking the files

The site is real files, and there are three ways to get them out. All three produce the same project — the difference is where it lands.

Download a zip

The simplest and the one with no accounts involved. You get the project as a folder, on your machine, immediately.

What is in the zip

Your pages

Everything the builder wrote

package.json

So the project installs

vite.config.js

So it builds

index.html

The entry point

README.md

How to run it

.gitignore

Sensible defaults

Note. The scaffold is added around your files, never over them. Anything the builder wrote wins — a generated index.html is not replaced by the scaffold's.

Push to GitHub

Puts the project in a repository of your own. Worth knowing how it lands: the whole project arrives as ONE commit rather than as a file-by-file trickle.

That matters if it ever fails. A push that breaks halfway would otherwise leave a repository holding half a site wired to components that are not there — a state the project never actually had. It either happens or the repository is untouched.

Deploy it yourself

Puts the site on your own hosting account rather than ours. This is the route to take if you want the site on a domain you own, or simply somewhere that is nothing to do with us.

What moves and what does not

The website moves. The services behind it are services, and an exported copy is a plain site until you give it somewhere to send things.

This is the honest trade and it is better known before you press the button than after.

Exporting: what comes with you

Pages and styling

Yes — the real files

Images and assets

Yes

The build scaffold

Yes — it installs and runs

The dashboard

No — a service the hosted version talks to

Existing leads

They stay on the dashboard

New messages

The exported site has nowhere to send them until you wire something up

Visitor history

No

Note. A site you have exported and hosted yourself is a website. It is not a website with a back room, unless you build one.

Why an export exists at all

Most website builders rent you a page. Stop paying and it goes dark, and there is nothing to take anywhere because there never was a file — the site only ever existed as rows in somebody's database.

Even if you never use it, the export's existence is what stops a monthly bill being a hostage situation. It is worth taking a copy once, early, simply so you know what you have.

Common questions