How long does it take to build a website?

A simple trade website takes about two weeks. A larger site with individual service and suburb pages takes four to six. The build itself is rarely the slow part — in our experience the single biggest cause of delay is waiting on content from the client, which is worth knowing before you start.

What the two weeks actually contains

1. Days 1–2: scope. What you do, who you want calling, which areas, what the site has to achieve. Short but it determines everything after it.
2. Days 3–5: structure and copy. Page map, headings, the words. If we are writing, this is where we need your input on the work you actually do.
3. Days 6–9: design and build. The visible part, and usually the fastest.
4. Days 10–12: review. You look at it properly and we change what needs changing.
5. Days 13–14: launch. Testing, redirects if you had an old site, search console, go live.

Why projects actually slip

Content. By a distance the most common cause. A site cannot launch with placeholder text where your services should be, and writing about your own business is harder than it sounds when you are on the tools all day. If you can set aside two hours early on, you will pull the timeline in more than anything else you could do.

Photos. Most trade businesses have fewer usable photos than they think. Stock imagery is an option but it is visibly stock, and for a trade business your real work is more persuasive. Start photographing jobs the day you commission a site.

Feedback in batches. One consolidated round of changes is much faster than eleven separate emails over two weeks. Not because the changes are hard, but because the context-switching is.

Domain and hosting access. If nobody knows who registered the domain in 2014, sorting that out can add a week on its own. Worth checking before you need it.

Rebuilds take longer than new sites

If you already have a site with rankings, the rebuild has an extra job: keeping them. Every old URL needs to point at its new equivalent, or you lose the traffic that page was earning. This is careful, unglamorous work, and it is the thing most often skipped by cheap rebuilds — we wrote up how to do it without losing rankings. Budget an extra week and make sure whoever quotes you mentions redirects unprompted.

Can it be done faster?

Yes, if the scope is small and the content is ready. We have launched simple Trade Starter sites inside a week when the client had their copy and photos organised. What we will not do is skip the redirect mapping on a rebuild or launch without testing on a phone — those save days and cost months.

John Ocello

Founder, PC Madness Web Services, Midland WA