How To Deploy GitHub Project on Vercel in 2026 Easily

Before Vercel enters the picture, your code needs to live in a GitHub repository. Create a new repo, name it something descriptive like "to-do," and use the Quick Setup screen's "Upload files" option to add your project directly from your file manager instead of dragging and dropping.

For a simple static project this can be as small as a single index.html file. Commit the changes, and your code is live on GitHub and ready to connect to a hosting platform.

Head to vercel.com and click Start Deploying from the homepage, then continue with GitHub to authenticate. If you're already signed into GitHub in another tab, Vercel typically detects and links the account automatically without asking you to log in twice.

After authenticating, click Import Git Repository. Vercel offers a choice between granting access to all of your GitHub repositories or just specific ones; selecting only the repository you're deploying is the safer option, since Vercel never sees the rest of your GitHub account.

Select the repo (to-do in this example) and click Install to finish linking it. If the repository doesn't appear in the picker, ownership is the usual reason: a Collaborator on a personal repo can't create a Vercel project from it, only the repo's Owner can.

Vercel's New Project screen shows exactly what it's importing (the repository name and branch, pmnonline/to-do on main in this case) plus a form for the Vercel Team, Project Name, Framework Preset, and Root Directory. For a plain HTML project with no framework, set the Framework Preset to "Other" instead of guessing at a specific one; Build and Output Settings and Environment Variables stay collapsed and can be left alone for a simple static site. Click Deploy once everything looks right.

When the build completes, Vercel shows a Next Steps panel with shortcuts for what to do now that the site is live: push a new branch for Instant Previews, add a custom domain, or enable Speed Insights to track how real users experience the site over time. None of these are required for a working deployment; they're the next layer of polish once basic hosting is confirmed working. Click Continue to Dashboard to move on.

The Vercel dashboard's Production Deployment view is where everything about the live site comes together: the generated deployment URL, any custom domains attached, the current status (Ready, here), who deployed it and when, and which commit it was built from. The Hobby badge next to the team name confirms which plan the project is on.

From here you can open Build Logs and Runtime Logs, or use Instant Rollback if a future deploy breaks something. The real payoff of connecting GitHub instead of uploading files manually is that Vercel deploys every push by default. A push to the production branch (usually main) updates the live domain; a push to any other branch, or to a pull request, builds a separate Preview Deployment with its own URL instead of touching the live site.