Your first deploy, click by click

A deploy is the moment your project becomes a real website that strangers can visit. It sounds dramatic. Mostly it involves waiting for a progress bar while pretending to be calm. Here's the whole journey, so nothing surprises you.

Before you start, gather three things

• Your project — a GitHub repository, a zip file, or nothing at all if you want us to install WordPress.
• A domain, if you have one. You can launch on a free sling.site address first and connect the domain later.
• Ten quiet minutes. That's genuinely the whole time budget.

The five clicks

1. 11. Create a projectPick your stack. If you're not sure, choose the closest match — you can change it later, and a wrong guess costs nothing but a rebuild.
2. 22. Connect your code (or don't)For Laravel and Next.js, connect GitHub and pick a repository. For WordPress and Drupal, press “install for me”. You'll get an admin login when it's ready.
3. 33. Name itChoose a temporary address like yourname.sling.site. It's free, it works immediately, and it's useful for sharing a preview before your domain is ready.
4. 44. Press DeployWe create the server, install dependencies, run the build, issue the SSL certificate and start the app. The progress log is written in sentences, not stack traces.
5. 55. Open the linkThat's your site. If something failed, the log tells you which step and gives you a “try again” button. Nothing is permanently broken at this stage.

After launch: the three habits

First, check that backups ran (the dashboard shows the last one in green). Second, add your domain so the padlock shows on the real address. Third, open your site on a phone — not because phones are special, but because it's the fastest way to spot a layout you forgot to finish.