Create Your First Website
Creating a website here is one short form and a wait of about a minute, from pressing the button to a working WordPress site on a live address with a valid certificate.
You do not need a domain to start. You can connect one later, or never.
Step 1: Open Add Website
Sign in at my.oxyforge.com and choose Add Website. You get three options, and it is worth knowing which one you want before you pick.
| Option | What you get | Uses a website slot | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create New Website | A fresh WordPress install on a temporary address | Yes | You are building a new site, or bringing one across |
| Create Dev Site | A blank WordPress install, password protected, no domain and no email | No, only storage | You want somewhere to experiment or build before a client sees it |
| Transfer A Website | A site someone else hands over to you | Yes | A developer or previous owner gave you a transfer code |
On the free plan the first two are shown greyed out with “Needs a paid plan”; the card you can use is Create Temporary Website, a site that lives 24 hours behind a password.
Choose Create New Website.
Step 2: Fill In The Form
Five things matter, and none of them are permanent decisions except the first one being sensible.
- Internal Site Name. What this site is called in your members area. Only you see it, so name it the way you think about it, such as “Client - Harbour Dental”.
- Site Title. The name WordPress shows to visitors. You can change this later in WordPress.
- WordPress Admin Username. Avoid
admin. Bots try that name first, every time. - WordPress Admin Email and WordPress Admin Password. This is the WordPress login, separate from your Oxyforge login. Use a long password, or press Generate.
Two optional settings sit among those.
- Address. The readable part of the temporary address, after the fixed
site-prefix. Leave it blank for a random one. - PHP Version. PHP 8.3 is the default and the right answer for almost everything. PHP 8.4, 8.2 and 8.1 are also selectable, for a site with a plugin that is not ready for 8.3 yet.
If you are migrating an existing site, create the website with the same PHP version your old host used, get the copy working, then move up to 8.3. One change at a time makes a broken page easy to explain.
Step 3: Wait For Provisioning
Press create and wait. Under a minute later the site exists, with WordPress installed, the database created, the object cache wired up and a certificate issued.
What you get is a managed stack you do not have to assemble: Nginx, PHP, MySQL 8.4, Redis for the object cache, a full-page cache that clears itself when you publish, and Cloudflare in front for the CDN and firewall. There is nothing to install or turn on.
Step 4: Open The Site On Its Temporary Address
Every new website gets an address shaped like site-1a2b3c4d.oxyforge.net. It is live, it has a valid certificate, and nobody knows it unless you tell them.
Open it. You should see a new WordPress site. This address is where all the real work happens, because anything you break on it is private.
Step 5: Sign In To WordPress
Press One Click Admin in the page header. That takes you into WordPress admin without typing the password you set a minute ago. The link it makes works once and expires after a minute, so press it again if you wait too long.
The Tools tab holds Clear Cache, the logs, the PHP version switch, the XML-RPC switch and Delete Website, so it is the one worth learning first. A tour of the members area walks through the rest of the tabs.
Step 6: Decide What This Site Is
From here the path splits.
A brand new site. Install your theme, build it out, and connect a domain when you are ready. See connect a domain to your website.
An existing site you are moving. Copy the old site onto this temporary address before you touch DNS. See move your site with a migration plugin, or move a site manually with SFTP and WP-CLI if you would rather do it by hand.
Either way, the domain is the last step, not the first.
What Not To Install
Do not install a caching plugin. The platform already runs a page cache and an object cache, and a plugin on top of them causes stale pages and odd behaviour that is hard to trace. The same goes for plugins tied to another host’s control panel.
Read how caching works here so you know what is already doing the job.
If Something Goes Wrong
Provisioning failed or stalled. Delete the site from the Tools tab and create it again. A minute of rebuilding beats inspecting a half-made install, and nothing else on your account is affected. A site that never finished building is removed outright rather than kept in the 30-day archive.
You cannot remember the WordPress password. Use One Click Admin in the page header, then change the password inside WordPress.
Add Website will not let you create one. You have probably used every website your plan allows: one on Build, three on Grow, ten on Scale. Delete a site you no longer need, move up a plan, or use Create Dev Site, which costs storage but not a website slot.
The temporary address shows a certificate warning. Make sure you typed https:// and the full address including the hex part. A near miss on the address will not resolve to your site.
Did this answer it? If not, open a ticket from the members area and someone who runs the platform will pick it up.
Open A Ticket