A friend built your website on GitHub Pages. What happens next?

Someone builds a website for a friend, publishes it to GitHub Pages, sends over the link, and it works. It looks good, it loads quickly, it cost nothing. Then the questions start: why do enquiries not arrive, why does the contact form do nothing when you press send, and how do you get an email address that ends in your own domain rather than a free one?

None of that means the site was built badly. It usually means the site is sitting on a service that was designed for something else, and the pieces a business needs were never part of it. Here is what GitHub Pages does well, what it was never meant to do, and how to keep everything that is already working.

What GitHub Pages is genuinely good at

GitHub Pages takes the files in a repository and serves them as a website, free, on fast infrastructure, with a custom domain and HTTPS if you point one at it. For a developer — or an AI coding tool, which is increasingly who builds these sites — it is a lovely workflow. Change a file, push the change, the live page updates. No control panel, no uploads, no fuss.

For a personal page, a portfolio, documentation or a landing page that only has to be looked at, that is a perfectly sensible choice. Plenty of good-looking small business sites start life exactly this way, and there is nothing wrong with the site itself.

Three things it was never built to do

1. Email on your own domain

GitHub Pages serves web pages. It has no mail service attached to it, so pointing a domain at GitHub Pages does not create hello@yourbusiness.co.uk — and it never will, because that is not what the service is. Business email needs a mail host: somewhere the mailboxes actually live, with the DNS records that tell the rest of the world where to deliver.

This is the one that tends to surface first, because a free address on an invoice or a van is the thing customers notice.

2. Anything that has to run on a server

A static host sends files to a browser. It does not run code when a visitor does something. So a contact form can look complete — name, email, message, a Send button — and still go nowhere, because there is nothing at the other end to receive it. The same applies to booking forms, member logins, search that queries a database, anything in PHP, and any of the open-source applications a small business ends up wanting.

A form needs somewhere to send its contents. That endpoint has to live on hosting that can run something.

3. The site lives in whoever's account built it

This is the quiet one. If a friend, a freelancer or a family member created the repository, the website is published from their account. That is fine while everyone is on good terms and available. It is less fine when they change jobs, go travelling, lose interest, or simply cannot be reached the week something needs changing — and it is their account, not yours, that holds the switch.

It is also worth reading GitHub's own terms. GitHub is explicit that Pages is not intended to be used as a free web hosting service for running an online business, and it reserves the right to act on sites that break that. A brochure page for a small firm is unlikely to be anyone's priority, but building a business on a service whose terms exclude that use is a risk worth naming.

A scenario that comes up more often than you would think

A small business owner gets a website built by a friend who is handy with these things. The friend uses an AI tool, produces something genuinely smart-looking, and publishes it to GitHub Pages under their own account. The owner buys the domain, follows the DNS instructions they were sent, and the site appears.

Then the practical questions arrive. Enquiries from the contact form never turn up. There is no mailbox on the domain, so the business is still using a free address. Any change means messaging the friend and waiting. Nothing here is broken, exactly — but the website is a shop window with no door and no letterbox.

The instinct at that point is usually to scrap it and start again, which is a shame, because the site is fine. The workflow is fine too. What is missing is a place for the site to live that can also do the other jobs a business needs.

You do not have to undo any of it

The useful split is this: keep building wherever building is comfortable, and publish somewhere that can run a business.

On hosting of your own, the same set of files gains the parts that were missing. Mailboxes on your own domain, so post goes to a name customers recognise. Somewhere for a form to submit to, so enquiries reach an inbox instead of vanishing. Room for the applications a growing business installs — a shop, a booking system, a knowledge base — without moving house again. Backups. And an account that belongs to the business, so the person who owns the company is also the person who owns the switch.

The workflow does not have to change either. Gravity Host's GitHub Sync checks a GitHub Pages address every hour, and when something has changed it copies the published site across to your hosting, with safety checks before and after so a broken or emptied source cannot take your live site down with it. Whoever builds the site — a friend, a developer, an AI tool — carries on exactly as they were. Visitors simply land on your domain, on your hosting, with your email and your forms attached. If you want the fuller comparison, there is a side-by-side of GitHub Pages and web hosting.

What to check this week

• Send yourself a test enquiry through your own contact form. If nothing arrives, the form has no endpoint — that is the single most expensive gap on this list.
• Look at the address on your invoices and signage. If it ends in a free provider rather than your domain, you need a mail host.
• Ask whose account the site is published from. If the answer is not yours, write down what would happen if that person were unreachable for a month.
• Check who holds the domain. The domain is the part of this that genuinely cannot be rebuilt from scratch, so it should sit in a registrar account in the business's name.

A website built by a friend on a free service is not a mistake to be embarrassed about. It is a normal, sensible first step, and the work already in it is worth keeping. The next step is simply giving it somewhere to live that can answer the door.