First setup
The checks worth doing before you begin normal publishing.
A fresh site works immediately, but these checks catch most hosting mistakes before they become harder to diagnose.
1. Check the installation
Open System → Site Health and System → Diagnostics. Resolve any storage, package integrity or environment errors before importing a site.
2. Test Media
Open System → Media Settings, review the limits, then upload one image at the root and one image inside a Media folder.
3. Configure Mail
Set up System → Mail Settings before enabling mail-dependent Forms, password recovery or double opt-in subscriptions. Send a test message and then test Forgot Password.
4. Configure background work
Set up cron for tasks.php. Immediate jobs can often wake themselves, but scheduled publishing, future jobs and retry delays still need a scheduler.
* * * * * php /path/to/site/tasks.php >/dev/null 2>&15. Create a backup
Create an initial Full Site Snapshot on a standalone installation, or a Recovery Point for the current Silo on a Bridge Host.
6. Review storage
If you plan to use MySQL or MariaDB on a standalone site, review Site Settings → Database migration before the site contains a large amount of live data.