How to create a website for your RP server

Every RP server starts with a Discord. At some point someone asks "do we have a website," and the honest answer is usually "not yet, we haven't needed one." This guide is for that point. It is not a build tutorial. It is the thing to work out before you open an editor: why you want a site, what it needs to contain, and which of the decisions below actually matter.

Why a website, when you already have a Discord

Discord is where your community talks. It is not where strangers find you. A new player searching "GTA RP servers" or your server's name does not land in your Discord, and even if they get an invite link from a friend, Discord gives them no reason to trust the server before they join it.

A website does three things Discord structurally cannot:

It shows up in search. A page with your server's name, your rules, and a join button can be found by people who have never heard of you.
It proves the server is alive. A live player count and an up-to-date rules page are evidence the community is active and maintained, before anyone has to ask in chat.
It gives you one stable link. "playourserver.com" survives a Discord server getting nuked, a channel getting renamed, or an invite link expiring. Put it on your Tebex page, your YouTube description, and your forum signature once, and it never goes stale.

None of this replaces Discord. It is the front door that points at it.

What the site actually needs

Not everything is worth building. This is the short list, roughly in order of how much it matters.

Live status and a join button. The single highest-value thing on the page. A visitor should be able to see the server is online, see roughly how many people are playing, and join in one click, without reading anything else first.
Rules. The page new players actually read. If your rules only exist as a pinned Discord message, they are one server reorganization away from being lost.
An FAQ. Whatever questions get asked in your support channel every week belong here instead, answered once.
A way to reach staff. A Discord invite, an application link, or both. This can be a single link, it does not need its own page.
Legal and imprint pages, if you run the server commercially. Selling perks, ranks, or a shop usually creates a legal obligation to publish operator details. Skipping this is a real risk, not a formality.

Optional, and only worth it if you will keep them updated: a news or changelog page, staff application forms, a store. An empty or stale version of any of these looks worse than not having it.

Picking how to build it

Three real options, in order of effort:

A page builder (Carrd, Framer, a website builder your host provides). Fastest to something live, weakest at the live-status piece, since most builders have no clean way to call your server's API on every page load.
A ready template built for RP servers. This site's own template, RPWebsite, is one example: it already has the rules, FAQ, and legal page structure above, plus a status widget that works with FiveM and RAGE:MP server APIs out of the box. You configure it rather than build it from nothing.
Custom code. The right call if your community has genuinely unusual needs, and the slowest path to a finished site otherwise.

If you already know you want the middle option, how to create a FiveM server website is the step-by-step version of this guide, config file and deploy included.

Domain and hosting, at a glance

You need two things, and neither requires deep technical knowledge to buy:

A domain. Any registrar works. Pick a name close to your server's own name, so people recognize it.
Somewhere to host it. If you use a template like RPWebsite, this is usually a free-tier hosting platform (Vercel is the common choice) rather than a traditional web host. If you use a page builder, hosting is typically included.

You do not need a database or a server you manage yourself for a site like this. The status widget talks to your game server's API directly when someone visits the page.

Staying findable and trustworthy

Two things matter more than most people expect:

A stable join address. On FiveM this is your cfx.re/join/xxxxxx code, covered in what a cfx.re join code is. Publish it once your site exists, and do not change it if you can avoid it.
Basic search visibility. A working page title, a real description, and content that actually answers what people search for gets you found without paid promotion. Getting a FiveM server found in search covers this properly if you want to go deeper.

Keeping it maintained

The most common failure is not a broken site, it is a stale one: rules that no longer match what staff actually enforce, an FAQ that answers last season's questions, a join code that changed months ago and never got updated on the homepage. Whatever you publish, treat it as something to revisit whenever Discord changes, not a one-time task.

Ready to build it

If FiveM is your platform, how to create a FiveM server website walks through the whole setup with RPWebsite, from an empty folder to a deployed site with your live player count on it. It takes about an hour.