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Going live — Findit Astro

Before you deploy

Section titled “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 and opening hours (the address, phones and info@example.com are placeholders) src/content/site.json
Logo replaced src/assets/images/logo.svg
Browser icons replaced public/icon.svg, public/apple-icon.png
Share image replaced and described 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/
Home page video replaced (or removed) hero.video in src/content/pages/home.json (or HomeHeroSection.astro)
Page titles and descriptions written for your business the meta of each file in src/content/pages/, the legal texts’ description
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy replaced with your own src/content/collections/legal.json
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 “Findit”, the sample address or the sample listings on a live site is the most common mistake. The legal texts are examples, not legal advice — have yours written or reviewed for your country.

Deploy

Section titled “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)

Section titled “Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages (free for most sites)”
  1. Push the project to GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.
  2. Import the repository. Astro is detected: build command npm run build, output folder dist.
  3. Add your form variables (PUBLIC_FORM_ENDPOINT, …) in the host’s environment settings, then deploy.
  4. 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, the vercel.json next to package.json has "cleanUrls": true — keep it.

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

Section titled “Any other host (shared hosting, S3, a VPS)”
Terminal window
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

Section titled “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

Section titled “After it is live”
  1. Check the pages. Click through every page on a phone and a laptop: menu, filters, the gallery on a property, the accordions, both tour and contact forms.
  2. Send yourself a submission from every form on the live site and reply to it.
  3. Verify the share card. Paste the URL of the home page and of a property into https://www.opengraph.xyz or a chat window and confirm the image and title.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Keep the listings moving. A new property is one entry in src/content/collections/properties.json; see Editing the content, or connect a CMS (Using a headless CMS) if someone else will publish. Remove a sold property by deleting its entry and rebuilding — its page disappears and your sitemap drops it.

Performance and SEO

Section titled “Performance and SEO”

The template ships with what search engines look for: static HTML, one <h1> per page, a title and description for every page, canonical links, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, share cards, optimised and lazy-loaded images and links in the HTML to every page, including those behind a filter. Pages that would only list nothing are kept out of search results. Keeping the site fast 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.