How long it takes to build a website

Where six weeks actually goes

Roughly half of that elapsed time is queueing rather than working. That is not a criticism of agencies; it is a property of a process where one side has to extract content from a business owner who is busy running a business.

Week one: discovery

A meeting, a questionnaire, and a proposal. Real work, but not building.

Weeks two and three: waiting for you

This is the big one. The project is blocked on content: your text, your photographs, your price list. It is the most common reason a website is late, by a distance.

Week four: design

Mock-ups, then a round of feedback, then a revision.

Week five: build

The actual construction. Often the shortest phase.

Week six: revisions and launch

Changes, testing, the domain, and going live.

What can genuinely be same-day

If the content problem is solved differently, most of the calendar disappears. Here the brief is one or two sentences, the words are written for you, and the photography is licensed and chosen for your trade, so there is nothing to wait for.

The build takes about a minute. You then spend as long as you like changing it, which for most people is twenty minutes. Going live takes a few hours, because a brand new web address has to propagate across the internet and a security certificate has to be issued.

What still cannot be rushed

• A new domain becoming visible everywhere: usually a few hours, occasionally most of a day.
• Your own photographs, if you want your own work on the page rather than licensed images. Worth the wait.
• Anything involving a third party: a booking system, a payment provider, an existing domain held by someone else.
• Being found in a search. The site is live the same day; ranking is a matter of months. Nothing legitimate changes that.

The honest timeline

Minute one

Describe the business. Two sentences.

Minute two

The finished site is on screen, written and designed, free to look at.

Twenty minutes

You change what you want and swap in your own photographs.

Same day

You choose the address, pay $199, and it goes live once the domain and certificate are ready.

What you actually end up owning

Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.

This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.

If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.