How Long Does It Take to Build a Website?
Most business websites take three to six weeks. Here is what happens in each of those weeks, and the one thing that delays almost every project.
Most business websites take three to six weeks from the first conversation to going live. A single landing page can be done in one to two weeks. A large site with custom functionality takes two to three months.
Those are working timelines, not sales timelines. Here is where the weeks actually go.
Week 1: Understanding and planning
Working out what the business does, who it sells to, what the site needs to achieve, and what pages that requires. Skipping this is what produces good-looking websites that do nothing.
Week 2: Design
The layout, the structure, how someone moves from landing on the site to getting in touch. This is where revisions happen, and where your feedback matters most.
Weeks 3 to 4: Build
Turning the design into a working website: responsive layouts, forms, speed, and the search-engine groundwork.
Week 5: Testing and launch
Checking it on real phones and browsers, testing every form, and going live. Then watching it for a few days.
The thing that delays almost every project
Content. Not design, not development, but waiting for text, photos, logos and product details from the client. A project that could take four weeks routinely takes ten because the content took six weeks to arrive.
If you want your website finished quickly, the single most useful thing you can do is have your content ready before the project starts. Even rough drafts help.
What you can do to keep it moving
- Gather your text, photos and logo before week one.
- Decide who gives feedback. One decision-maker is faster than five opinions.
- Give feedback in batches, not one message at a time.
- Say what you do not like and why. “Make it pop” is hard to act on.
Want this looked at for your business?
Tell us where you are now and where you want to get to. We will tell you honestly what we would do first.