Getting the foundations right at the start saves a lot of pain later. These are the steps worth taking before you write a single line of content.

1. Choose the right hosting

Not all hosting is equal. For a small to medium site, look for:

  • Uptime guarantee of 99.9% or better
  • SSD storage — significantly faster than HDD
  • PHP 8.x support if you are running WordPress or similar
  • Daily backups included, not an expensive add-on
  • cPanel or similar control panel you can actually use

Shared hosting is fine to start. Move to a VPS when you are getting consistent traffic above around 50,000 visits per month.

2. Register your domain separately from your hosting

Never register your domain through the same company as your hosting. If you ever want to move hosts, you will be glad the domain is independent. Namecheap and Cloudflare Registrar are both reliable and reasonably priced.

3. Point your domain to your host

Once hosting is set up you will be given nameserver addresses — usually two, like ns1.hostingcompany.com and ns2.hostingcompany.com. Log in to your domain registrar and update the nameservers there. DNS propagation takes anywhere from a few minutes to 48 hours.

4. Install an SSL certificate immediately

Before you put any content live, get HTTPS working. Most hosts offer free Let's Encrypt certificates through the control panel — look for SSL/TLS in cPanel. Enable auto-renewal so it doesn't expire.

Once installed, set up a redirect so all HTTP traffic goes to HTTPS:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

5. Set up your .htaccess basics

A few lines in .htaccess make a significant difference:

# Disable directory browsing
Options -Indexes

# Protect .htaccess itself
<Files .htaccess>
  Order allow,deny
  Deny from all
</Files>

# Hide server version info
ServerSignature Off

6. Verify in Google Search Console

Add your site to Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. This is how Google discovers your pages and how you find out if anything goes wrong with crawling or indexing.

What next?

With the foundations in place, work through the Performance, Security and Maintenance sections to build on this base.