Thank you so much Brett Donald! You have worked out what it was.
I was so excited when it started loading something other than my blank text site. However (as explained in comment to Brett's answer) I am now getting an issue of the website being stuck in a continual loading loop.
Since all the information about my situation is in this thread, rather than creating a new thread I thought I would just ask for the solution here.
Maybe the problem will be solved if I continue the conversion to PHP? I'm not sure as I am still very much a beginner so I'm still learning the basics.
Maybe the problem won't be solved by continuing to convert my HTML template. In which case what do I do? I looked up this problem on a search engine and found a reddit post where someone suggested pressing f12 to open the console then under the network tab make sure the "persist" setting was enabled. However I can't find that exact setting. I found something called persistance and I checked the option under that but it still didn't fix the issue.