A ten-page business website is a week or two of work. Most of them take three to six months anyway.
The gap between those two numbers is almost never the code, which is what to know before you accept a timeline or blame yourself for a slow one.
What the timelines look like
- Builder template, done yourself: a weekend to get something live, then weeks of picking at it.
- Cheap marketplace build: one to two weeks, because nobody is writing anything or asking questions.
- Independent designer or developer: two to six weeks, depending almost entirely on how fast content arrives. Mine run two.
- Agency: two to four months, sometimes more. Discovery, presentations, revision rounds, and several calendars to coordinate.
We launch in two weeks, and it takes no heroics. Waiting on content, decisions with no owner, and revision rounds run on a calendar are what consume the other ten.
What eats the time
In order, and none of them are technical:
Waiting on content. This is the big one. The build stalls because nobody has written the About page or found a decent photo of the shop. A project can sit here for two months while everyone waits politely for someone else.
Decisions with no owner. Three people with opinions and nobody who decides. Every question takes a week to come back and half of them come back changed.
Revision rounds as a process. Where feedback is collected, scheduled, presented, and repeated every two weeks, the calendar sets the pace rather than the work.
How to make yours fast
- Name one decision maker. One person whose answer is final. This alone can halve a project.
- Have your content ready, or pay someone to write it. Hours, services, prices, the story of the business. If writing it's going to take you six weeks, it's cheaper to have it written. Copywriting is part of every build.
- Get the photos sorted early. Book the shoot before the build starts, rather than after the layout is done.
- Give feedback in one pass. Go through the whole site once and send everything together.
- Sort your domain access now. Hunting for a login from a web company you used in 2016 has delayed more launches than any technical problem.
When a long timeline is a warning sign
Four months for a ten-page brochure site isn't thoroughness. It usually means you're one of many projects in a queue, or that the process has more steps than the work needs.
Ask what the first two weeks consist of and what you'll see at the end of them. A straight answer is a good sign, and a demo you can click through is a better one. If nothing is visible for a month, the project has not started.
Long timelines are legitimate when there's genuine complexity: a booking system that talks to your existing software, a shop with a thousand products, a migration off a large old site without losing rankings. Complexity is a reason to wait. Being stuck in somebody's queue isn't.
What launch should include
A site isn't finished when it looks right. Before you call it launched, all of this should be done:
- Every form tested end to end, from a phone, with the email actually arriving.
- Redirects in place from the old URLs, if you had a site before.
- Google Business Profile connected and the search basics set up.
- Analytics running, so you can tell whether it's working.
- The domain pointing at it with SSL working on both the www and non-www versions.
- You shown how to change your own hours and prices.
Skipping the redirects is the expensive one. It's how a business finishes a redesign and loses the search traffic it spent years building. More on that in how much a website should cost.