How long does it take to build a website?

Guide · Updated 20 July 2026 · Written by James

Somewhere between an afternoon and six months, depending on who you ask. That range is useless, so this guide breaks it down properly: what genuinely takes days, what takes months, why so many builds drag on past their deadline, and what you can do to keep yours on schedule.

The short answer

For a typical local business site of five to ten pages, a freelancer or small studio should deliver in one to three weeks from the day they have your content. A DIY builder takes as long as your spare evenings allow, which is usually longer than you think. An agency build runs two to six months. The single biggest factor is not the developer's speed. It's how quickly the words, photos, and decisions arrive.

What actually moves the timeline

Four things decide whether your site launches this month or drifts into next quarter:

• Content readiness. The number one cause of delay, by a mile. A builder can design around placeholder text for a while, but nobody can launch a site with "About us copy TBC" on it. If your text and photos are ready on day one, you have removed most of the risk.
• Page count and features. A five-page brochure site is quick. Online booking, galleries, blogs, and custom forms each add build and testing time. They're worth having, but each one is a line in the schedule.
• Revision rounds. Two focused rounds of feedback keep things moving. Six rounds of "can we try the logo a bit bigger" is where timelines go to die. Gather feedback from everyone in your business at once, then send it as one list.
• Who you hire. A one-person studio makes decisions in minutes. An agency routes them through an account manager, a designer, and a developer, and each handoff adds days. More on that trade-off in our guide to website costs, because the same structure that slows things down is also what you're paying for.

A realistic week-by-week build

Here's what a well-run small-studio build actually looks like. Ours runs on this shape, and most good freelancers work roughly the same way:

• Days 1 to 2: Discovery. A call or questionnaire covering what the business does, who the customers are, what the site needs to achieve, and examples of sites you like. Boring paperwork bits too: domain access, hosting decisions.
• Days 3 to 6: Design. The look and feel takes shape: layout, colours, type, and how the homepage sells the business. You review it and send one round of honest feedback.
• Days 7 to 11: Build. The approved design becomes a real, working website. Content goes in, forms get wired up, everything gets tested on phones as well as desktops, because that's where most of your visitors are.
• Days 12 to 14: Launch. Final checks, connecting the domain, SSL certificate, and making sure Google can find and index the site. Then it goes live and you get a walkthrough of how everything works.

That's ten to fourteen days, and the honest caveat is the phrase doing the heavy lifting: from the day the builder has your content. The calendar time from first enquiry to launch is often a week or two longer, and almost all of that gap is waiting for words and photos.

Why DIY takes longer than the adverts say

Wix and Squarespace adverts suggest you'll be live by teatime, and technically you can be. But "live" and "good" are different finishing lines. Getting a template to stop looking like a template, writing your own copy, sourcing photos that aren't obvious stock, and making it behave on mobile is genuinely slow work when you're learning the tool as you go.

In practice, most business owners doing it themselves spend two or three hours an evening, a couple of evenings a week, for a month or more. Call it 20 to 30 hours of your time. If your evenings are better spent on the business itself, or frankly on anything else, that's the real cost. It's the same trade-off we cover in the website versus social media question: the cheap option is rarely cheap once your time goes in the ledger.

Why agency builds take months

Two to six months is normal for an agency project, and it isn't because agencies are slow at typing. Their process has more people and more stages: discovery workshops, strategy documents, stakeholder reviews, design sign-offs, development sprints, QA rounds. For a fifty-page site with e-commerce and a marketing plan behind it, that process earns its keep. For a five-page site for a local trades business, it's a lot of meetings for the same end result a good freelancer delivers in a fortnight.

What slows a build down (and how to avoid it)

• Late content. The classic. Fix: write your page text before the project starts, or ask the builder upfront whether copywriting is included.
• Slow feedback. Every day a design sits unreviewed is a day added to launch. Fix: agree feedback turnaround times at the start, both ways.
• Scope creep. "While you're in there, could we also add a shop?" changes the schedule. New ideas are fine, but agree whether they land in this build or in phase two.
• Lost domain access. If your domain was registered years ago by a nephew or a defunct agency, finding the login can take longer than building the site. Fix: track down your domain registrar details before the project starts.
• Too many decision-makers. If three partners each give separate feedback, the builder gets contradictions. Fix: pick one person to collect and send decisions.

Where we sit, for transparency

Brava Digital is a one-person Norwich studio. A complete site is £399, and most builds go live in 10 to 14 days once the content is in, following the exact four-step process described above. If your content isn't ready, that's normal, and helping shape it is part of the job rather than an excuse to let the schedule slip.