PUBLISH GUIDE
How to publish a website — from idea to live URL, in under 30 minutes.
Building the site, picking your URL, connecting a domain, hitting publish — we'll walk through the 5 platform-agnostic steps and honestly compare the 5 most popular ways to get your site live, with or without code.
Free to build · No credit card · Pay when you publish
HONEST COMPARISON
The five most popular ways to publish a website
Quick heads-up: we make Zarla. We've put it #1 below — and we've listed the catch on every option, including ours. Pick the one that matches your situation. If publishing fast is what you're after, the Build button up top takes you straight to it.
- 1
Zarla
Best forSmall business owners who want to go from "no website" to "live on my own domain" in under 30 minutes, without learning hosting, DNS, or SSL.
Features- One click to publish — SSL, mobile, and meta tags included
- Free Zarla subdomain for previewing, custom domain on Premium
- Hosting, CDN, and email forwarding bundled — no separate accounts
- Built-in editor for post-publish changes (no re-deploy step)
- Domain registration included on Premium
The CatchTry Zarla free — see your site in 30 seconds →Free covers building, previewing, and editing your full site on a Zarla subdomain. To publish to your own custom domain — and unlock CRM, booking, and payments — you'll need Premium. If you just want to see what your site looks like before deciding, free is enough.
- 2
Wix
Best forOwners who already use Wix's editor and want the publish button right next to the design tools.
Features- Publish button in the top right of the editor
- Free tier publishes to a wixsite.com subdomain
- Custom domain requires a Premium plan ($17/mo+)
- SSL automatic on any plan
The CatchThe free tier publishes — but with Wix branding in the URL, a Wix banner ad, and no custom domain. To remove all three you need at minimum the Light plan, which moves your site to your own domain but keeps it locked inside Wix's ecosystem.
- 3
Squarespace
Best forBrand-conscious owners who want polished design defaults and a connected domain in one paid plan.
Features- Publish from inside the design editor
- 14-day free trial; paid from day 15
- Custom domain included free for the first year on annual plans
- SSL, mobile, and CDN all automatic
The CatchThere's no permanent free tier. After 14 days you must pick a paid plan ($16/mo+) to keep your site live. Plan ahead — if your trial ends before you're ready to launch, your site goes offline until you pay.
- 4
WordPress.com
Best forBloggers and content-first owners who want a publish button on a familiar interface and don't mind a subdomain on the free tier.
Features- Publish from the dashboard with one click
- Free tier with a yoursite.wordpress.com subdomain
- Custom domain on paid plans (Personal $4/mo+)
- SSL automatic on every plan
The CatchEasy to confuse with WordPress.org — the open-source software you'd install on your own hosting. WordPress.com is the hosted SaaS (one click to publish); WordPress.org is the software (you set up hosting and a domain separately, then install + maintain it yourself). Pick .com unless you specifically want full code control.
- 5
GitHub Pages
Best forDevelopers and tinkerers who already write HTML and CSS and want free static hosting straight from a git repo.
Features- Free hosting for static sites — no plan upgrade ever needed
- Auto-publishes from a `main` branch on push
- Custom domain supported (you bring DNS records)
- SSL automatic when you turn it on in settings
The CatchZero visual editor. Every change is a git commit. You write the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript yourself (or use a static-site generator like Hugo or Jekyll) — GitHub Pages just serves the files. Great for personal projects and dev docs; rough fit for a small business owner who just wants a website live.
THE 3-WORD CONFUSION
Publishing, hosting, and a domain — what's actually different?
This is the question that traps small business owners the longest, so we'll answer it directly.
A domain is your address — yourbusiness.com. You buy it from a registrar (Zarla bundles domain registration into Premium; standalone, it's $10–15/yr at GoDaddy, Namecheap, or Cloudflare). It's just a name pointed at a server.
Hosting is the server itself — the computer that actually delivers your site to visitors. Hosting is what FTP, cPanel, and Bluehost-style products used to mean. Modern website builders include hosting in their paid plans, so you never see a hosting bill.
Publishing is the act of pushing your current site to the hosting server, where the live URL becomes visible to visitors. In a modern builder this is one click. In the old world it meant uploading files via FTP and praying the database connection didn't break.
You need all three to have a website live on your own URL. The good news: every modern AI website builder bundles hosting + publishing, and most include domain registration on their paid plans too. The bad news: every builder splits the bundle differently — see the catches above.
- Domain = your address (yourbusiness.com)
- Hosting = the server that delivers your site to visitors
- Publishing = the action that pushes your site to the server
- Zarla bundles all three — Premium includes domain, hosting, SSL, CDN, and email forwarding
- Basic SEO (meta tags, structured data, sitemap, alt text) — every modern builder emits these automatically; Google Business profile is the one piece you do yourself after publishing
STEP-BY-STEP
How to publish a website in 5 steps
These steps apply to any website builder. Modern AI builders collapse all five into about a minute; older platforms make you do each one yourself.
Decide what your website needs to do
Before opening any builder, get clear on one thing: who's visiting and what you want them to do (book a quote, buy a thing, sign up). Most owners can say it in one sentence — "Family-run plumbing business in Brooklyn, want emergency callouts to fill the calendar." That sentence becomes the AI builder's input, or your design brief if you're building manually.
Build the site (with AI, a template, or from scratch)
AI builders like Zarla take your sentence and generate the full site — copy, layout, images, SEO — in about 30 seconds. Template builders (Wix, Squarespace) start you in a pre-designed template that you fill in. Hand-coding takes longest but gives full control. Same destination, very different time investment.
Pick your URL — free subdomain or custom domain
Every builder gives you a free starter URL (e.g. yoursite.zarla.com or yoursite.wixsite.com) so you can preview the site immediately. To launch on your own brand (yourbusiness.com), you'll either buy a domain inside the builder or connect a domain you already own.
Connect your domain (skip if using the free subdomain)
If you bought your domain inside the builder, it's connected automatically. If you bought it elsewhere (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare), you'll update the domain's nameservers or DNS records to point at your builder's servers. Zarla provides one-click DNS setup; other builders give you a record list to paste in.
Hit publish — and you're live
One button. Your site goes live at your URL in seconds, with SSL certificate, mobile-responsive output, search-engine meta tags, and CDN distribution all handled automatically. No FTP, no rsync, no deploy script. As soon as you're live, claim your Google Business profile (free, 5 minutes) and submit your URL to Google Search Console — that's how local customers actually find you. Most builders let you keep editing afterwards and re-publish each change instantly.
ALREADY WROTE HTML?
What if you already wrote HTML — can you just upload it?
If you've already written the HTML yourself (or used Claude / ChatGPT to generate it), you've got two paths.
Path 1 — Static hosting like GitHub Pages, Netlify, or Cloudflare Pages. Drop your files into a git repo, point the platform at it, get a live URL in minutes. Free for personal projects; SSL automatic. You're now your own developer — every edit means a code change and a deploy.
Path 2 — A managed website builder. Paste your business description into Zarla; the AI rebuilds the site as editable blocks, and you get a publish button, a domain, and a visual editor — without owning the deploy step.
The split is real: if you love writing code, GitHub Pages is great. If you'd rather edit copy by typing what you want, a managed builder will save you hours every time something changes. Zarla's MCP server is the middle ground — Claude or Cursor can drive your Zarla site directly, so you get a one-click publish AND the AI-driven editing you're already used to.
- GitHub Pages, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages: free static hosting, deploy via git
- Zarla, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com: managed builders with visual editing and a publish button
- Static hosting is great for personal projects; managed wins for ongoing edits
- Zarla's MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor drive your site — best of both worlds
Want to skip the setup and just see your site live?
Type one sentence about your business. We'll generate the full site in 30 seconds — preview it on a free subdomain, publish to your own domain when ready.
Free to build and preview · Pay only to go live · Cancel any time
Common questions about publishing a website
Most modern website builders publish with one click from inside the editor. The publish button takes your current site state, generates production HTML/CSS/images, requests an SSL certificate, and pushes everything to the builder's hosting servers — usually in 10–60 seconds. Zarla's publish flow takes about 8 seconds total. Older platforms (or self-hosted setups like WordPress.org) require you to upload files via FTP, configure a hosting account, and provision SSL separately.
Free if you're OK with a builder subdomain like yoursite.wixsite.com or yoursite.zarla.com — Wix, Google Sites, and WordPress.com all publish on the free tier. To publish to your own domain (yourbusiness.com), expect $10–30 per month plus $10–15 per year for the domain. Zarla bundles domain registration into Premium; Wix Light is $17/mo plus the domain; Squarespace Personal is $16/mo with the first year of domain free. GitHub Pages publishes free even on a custom domain — but you write the HTML yourself.
Yes — on a builder subdomain. Wix, WordPress.com, Google Sites, and GitHub Pages all let you publish a site for $0. The trade-off is the URL has the builder's name in it (e.g. yoursite.wixsite.com), which looks less professional to customers and can affect SEO. Zarla offers a different model: free covers the entire build and preview process — every section, the full design, the AI editing — but publishing to your own domain requires Premium. If you just want to see your site before committing, Zarla's free tier goes the furthest.
Hosting is the server (the computer your site lives on); publishing is the action of pushing your current site to that server. In modern website builders, hosting is included with the publish button — you never see a separate hosting bill. In older self-hosted setups (WordPress.org, custom-coded sites), you buy hosting separately (Bluehost, DigitalOcean, etc.) and publish by uploading files via FTP. Zarla, Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress.com all bundle hosting + publishing as one product.
No — every modern website builder gives you a free subdomain (e.g. yoursite.zarla.com) the moment you publish. The subdomain works as a real URL: you can share it with customers, link to it from social media, and Google will eventually index it. A custom domain (yourbusiness.com) is recommended for any business you intend to take seriously — it looks more professional, builds trust, and ranks better in local search. Most builders include domain registration on paid plans; standalone, a domain is $10–15 per year.
Under a minute for the publish action itself — modern builders are fast. Zarla publishes in about 8 seconds. The total time from "no website" to "live on my custom domain" depends on whether you're building from scratch and whether DNS has propagated. With Zarla: about 30 seconds to generate the site + 8 seconds to publish + 0–2 hours for DNS to propagate to your custom domain = same-day launch. With a developer plus Wix or Squarespace: typically a few hours to a few days of editing time, then minutes to publish.
Depends which WordPress you mean. WordPress.com (the hosted SaaS version) has a publish button in the dashboard — one click and the post or page goes live. WordPress.org (the self-hosted open-source software) requires you to first install WordPress on your own hosting (Bluehost, SiteGround, DigitalOcean), then publish from the dashboard. Most small business owners want WordPress.com unless they specifically need a plugin or theme that only WordPress.org supports. If you're already on .org and the maintenance has become a chore, importing your content into Zarla or Squarespace is usually a one-day project.
Yes — but with a 1-14 day lag, and faster if you help. Google discovers new sites by crawling the web, so it'll find a freshly-published page on its own within a couple of weeks. To speed it up: submit your URL via Google Search Console (free, takes 5 minutes), claim your Google Business profile (separate from Search Console, also free), and make sure your sitemap is accessible at /sitemap.xml (every modern builder publishes one automatically — Zarla emits a clean sitemap on every site). The Zarla publish flow takes care of the technical SEO basics (meta tags, structured data, alt text, canonical URLs) so you start ranking the day you launch. See /best-website-builder-for-seo for the deeper guide.
Start with Zarla. The free tier lets you build and preview your entire site — every section, your industry-specific copy, your color palette — before any decision. Type one sentence about your business; you'll see it live on a Zarla subdomain in about 30 seconds. If it's the right fit, upgrading to Premium publishes to your own domain in another click. If it's not, you've spent zero dollars and learned something about what "modern" AI publishing actually looks like — useful even if you end up on a different platform.
Common publishing mistakes to avoid
Five mistakes that cost more visitors than the publish button can save. All are 1-edit fixes once you know to look for them.
- Hitting publish before previewing on mobile. Roughly 70% of visits to small-business sites are mobile. A site that looks great on a laptop and broken on iPhone loses the inquiry before it's read. Every modern builder has a one-click mobile preview — use it.
- Publishing to a builder subdomain for a real business. "yourbusiness.wixsite.com" or "yourbusiness.zarla.com" works fine for previewing; it costs trust and trust the moment a real customer sees it. Buy the .com (or .com.au, .co.uk, .nz) early.
- Forgetting to claim Google Business profile after publishing. The website is half of getting found; the Google Business profile is the other half. Without it, "near me" searches send customers to your competitors who did claim theirs. Free, takes 5 minutes, and is the single highest-ROI action right after publish.
- Connecting a custom domain but not updating social profile links. Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and Google Business all need the new domain. If they still point at the old subdomain, you've just split the SEO juice between two URLs. Update them the same day you launch.
- Letting SSL or DNS warnings persist. Browser "Not Secure" badges and DNS error pages kill conversions instantly. SSL renews automatically on every modern builder; DNS changes propagate in 0-2 hours. If anything's still warning a day later, check the DNS records and contact support.
Type one sentence. See your site live in 30 seconds.
Free to build and preview the full site. Publish to your own domain when you're ready — Premium unlocks custom domain, CRM, bookings, and payments.
Free to build and preview · Pay only to go live · Cancel any time