How Long Does It Take to Build a Business Website?

A custom website built to be found usually takes six to eight weeks from kickoff to launch, depending on how complex it is and how many people are involved. Most of the variation comes from content and decisions rather than development, which means a good share of the timeline is in the owner’s hands.

What fills the six to eight weeks

The site is planned around how your customers actually search, with a page for each service and each area you work in, content written from scratch, and connections to the tools the business already runs on. Discovery and planning come first, then design, then writing and building, then review and launch. Projects with more complexity or several people approving things run longer. Scope is also the main driver of what the project costs.

You’ll see much shorter timelines quoted, often two weeks. Those are template sites: a few pages dropped into somebody else’s layout. They get a business online, but they rarely get it found, because they give search engines very little to work with.

What actually causes delays

Content. This is the number one reason websites take longer than expected. The developer is waiting for your logo. Or the copy for your services page. Or photos of your work. Or approval on a design. If you don’t have your content ready before the project starts, you’ll be the bottleneck.

Decision-making. If multiple people need to approve things, each round of feedback takes longer. The owner, their spouse, their business partner and their nephew, who “knows websites.” Every additional opinion adds time.

Scope creep. The project starts as five pages and grows to twelve as new ideas come up. Every addition extends the timeline.

Revisions. Multiple rounds of changes, especially on content and design, add up quickly.

How to go faster

Show up prepared. Before any developer starts work, have these things ready:

• Your logo in a vector format, if possible or a high-resolution PNG
• A clear list of what pages you need
• The copy for each page, even rough notes are better than nothing
• Photos, either your own or a clear direction on what you want
• One decision-maker who can approve things quickly

If you can hand all of that over on day one, the project moves noticeably faster.

Where the time goes

Most of it goes into the parts that decide whether the site brings in work: working out which services and which towns deserve their own pages, writing each of those pages for the people searching there, and setting up the search basics, the Google Business Profile connection, analytics, and the forms so each inquiry lands with a person rather than an inbox nobody checks. None of that shows up in a screenshot, and all of it shows up in the phone ringing.

The bottom line

A custom website built for search usually takes six to eight weeks, longer when the build is complex or several people are approving things, because it’s doing more than a template ever will. The biggest thing you can do to keep it on schedule is have your content ready and one person making decisions before anyone starts building.

dwellTEK builds custom websites for growing businesses, scoped and priced before anything starts. See how we approach a build.