Going live — Titen Astro

Before the site goes public, replace the demo’s details and pictures and point the forms at you. Then build it, upload the static files to any host, and check it once more on the live address.

Before you deploy

	Where
Your domain in site.url	src/content/site.json. Share links, sitemap.xml and robots.txt are built from it.
Name, title, description	src/content/site.json
Contact details (contact@example.com, the phone number and the address are placeholders)	contact in src/content/site.json
Social links	socials in src/content/site.json
Logo replaced	src/design-system/components/brand/Logo.astro (Making it look like your brand)
Browser icons replaced	public/icon.svg, public/apple-icon.png
Share image replaced and described	public/opengraph-image.png, its description in src/layouts/Layout.astro
Demo text and photos replaced	src/content/pages/, src/content/collections/, src/assets/images/
The two videos replaced (or removed)	Editing the content
Your brochure instead of the placeholder	public/brochure.pdf (Editing the content)
Team and awards	team and awards in src/content/pages/about.json
Page titles and descriptions written for your business	The meta of each file in src/content/pages/
The forms deliver to you	Forms
Style guide kept or deleted	src/pages/style-guide.astro
npm run build passes and npm run preview looks right	—

The demo content is there to be replaced. Leaving “Titen”, the sample address or the sample projects on a live site is the most common mistake.

Deploy

npm run build writes a complete static site to dist/: HTML files, one stylesheet, a few small scripts and optimised images. Any host that serves files can run it, with no Node.js needed on the server (unless you chose server-mode forms).

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, keep the vercel.json next to package.json: it has "cleanUrls": true.

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

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

If you set PUBLIC_FORM_MODE=server, add your host’s adapter first (npx astro add vercel, netlify, cloudflare or node). Only the form routes run on the server; every page stays static.

After it is live

1. Check the pages. Click through every page on a phone and a laptop:
   • the menu and the project search;
   • the accordion and the service list on Home;
   • the slideshows (Home testimonials, About approach);
   • the videos;
   • the forms.
2. Send yourself a submission from the live site and reply to it.
3. Verify the share card. Paste the URL of the home page and of a project 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 work coming. A new project is one entry in src/content/collections/projects.json, a new post one entry in posts.json; see Editing the content, and rebuild. Connect a CMS (Using a headless CMS) if someone else will publish.

Performance and SEO

The template ships with what search engines look for:

• static HTML, with links in it to every page;
• one <h1> per page, and a title and description for every page;
• canonical links, sitemap.xml, robots.txt and share cards;
• optimised, lazy-loaded images.

Keeping the site fast is mostly about images and videos. Astro resizes photos, but a 12 MB camera file still slows the build, so export them around 2400 px wide. Keep the looping videos short and small. The demo’s videos play from stock sites whose servers set cookies; your own video files from your own domain don’t.