How to Make a Website: The Whole Path, in Order

Learning how to make a website is mostly learning the order to do things in, because every step you take out of sequence is a step you repeat later. The path is short: decide what the site is for, write the page list, get the domain, choose one of three routes, build four or five pages, publish, then check. Nothing in that list is difficult and only one part is slow, which is writing the words. This lesson walks the whole path and links the lesson that covers each step in depth, so you can read the detail where you need it and skip ahead where you do not.

Step one is not a tool. It is a page list.

Before you compare anything, write down what the site is for in one sentence and what pages it needs. Most first sites need fewer pages than their owners assume, and every extra page is another thing to write, photograph and keep true. Keep the list to four or five items and treat anything else as version two.

• A home page that says what this is within the first screen, without scrolling.
• An about page, because people check whether a real person or organisation is behind a site far more often than they admit.
• A contact page with a method that works and that somebody watches. An unmonitored form is worse than no form, because it looks like a promise.
• One page per genuine offering: per thing you can deliver next week, not per aspiration.
• A real 404 page that links back into the site rather than dead-ending.

Then write the words for those pages in a plain document, before you look at a single template. This is the single largest saving available on any route. Construction is quick in 2026 and deciding what the site says is not, so people who write first finish in a fraction of the time on every platform. If you find yourself two weekends in with a beautiful layout and no words, you have not been building a website. You have been avoiding writing one. It also fixes the most common source of overrun on paid projects, which is a designer waiting for content that never arrives.

The three routes, and what actually separates them

There are six ways a site can get made, and for a first site three of them matter: a hosted builder, a content management system you install on hosting you rent, or HTML and CSS you write yourself. Our lesson on what a website builder is defines each of them properly and explains why AI generators are an input method rather than a fourth route.

Read the two middle columns together. The route you pick changes your first afternoon enormously and your first quarter barely at all, which is why speed to live is the least useful thing to choose on. Choose on maintenance instead. A builder bundles the editor, the storage, the renderer and the hosting into one subscription and takes the upkeep away; a CMS hands you a site that moves anywhere and a job that never ends; hand-coding gives you files that will still render in fifteen years and no way for anyone else to edit them. Our comparison of the three routes over one afternoon shows what each one trades away to hit the same deadline.

The domain, the certificate, and getting it live

Buy the domain early, because it is the one part of launch day you cannot speed up. You are not buying it outright either way: a domain is a rental you hold for as long as you keep renewing, so turn auto-renew on and check the card on file. Compare the renewal price rather than the first-year price. Verisign charges every registrar the same wholesale rate for a .com, $10.26 a year rising to $10.97 on 1 November 2026, and registration and renewal cost the registry exactly the same, so a 99-cent first year is a registrar losing money to acquire you and recovering it later at $18 to $22. Our lesson on domains, DNS and hosting has the four records you will actually touch.

Then two things people expect to be hard and are not. The padlock is free: Let's Encrypt issues certificates automatically over a protocol your host speaks, so nobody should pay for an ordinary certificate in 2026. And there is no such thing as propagation. What exists is a cache with an expiry clock called the TTL, so if you are moving an existing domain, drop the TTL on the records you will change to 300 seconds a day beforehand and the switch lands in minutes. Certificate lifetimes are also shortening on a one-way trend, which makes renewing by hand a finished practice; either your builder does it invisibly, or a managed host such as SiteGround does it for you, or you make sure something automated does and you know how you would find out if it stopped.

Before you tell anyone it exists

Publish small and complete rather than large and thin

Live means a real address serves a real page over HTTPS. Finished means the content is complete and you would not wince if a customer landed on any page. Confusing the two produces both classic failures: the site that goes live with four half-written pages and stays that way for a year, and the site that never launches because it is never quite ready. Three finished pages beat eight thin ones, and a live site tells you things a draft never will.

Run the checks that matter on a phone

Open the site on an actual phone rather than a narrowed browser window, check that tap targets suit a thumb and that nothing scrolls sideways, then resize your images, because on a first site the biggest speed problem is almost always a photograph straight off a camera. Our launch checklist covers the rest in order: the privacy policy, consent before non-essential scripts run, analytics installed before you announce anything, a favicon, and a link preview you have actually looked at.

Answer the backup question in writing

If this breaks tomorrow, what restores it? Hosted builders back up automatically. A self-hosted CMS does not unless somebody configured it, and a hand-coded site in version control is backed up by definition. Test a restore once now, while the site does not matter yet, because an untested backup is a belief rather than a backup. If that answer is uncomfortable and nobody is going to own the upkeep, that is a reason to take the managed route: a host that handles updates, backups and certificates, or a builder that removes the question entirely. Which of the three routes suits you is the decision our which path lesson exists to make.