Error 403 after moving from development to production

I am trying to deploy a working local laravel 5.6 app to shared production environment. I took the following steps:

• Copied from local folder to production folder
• created vendor folder in main production folder
• run composer update
• run php artisan key:generate
• run chmod -R 755 storage
• move public/.htaccess to main production folder
• edit require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php'; to require __DIR__.'/../project_folder/vendor/autoload.php';
• edit $app = require_once __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php'; to $app = require_once __DIR__.'/../project_folder/bootstrap/app.php';

The following urls give these errors:

https://domain/~useraccount/project_folder

Error 403

https://domain/~useraccount/project_folder/public

Error 505

https://domain/~useraccount/project_folder/public/index.php

Error 404

Is there anything else I'm missing here?

via Chebli Mohamed