How long does it take to build a website?

The honest ranges first, because you probably came here for a number.

• A straightforward site of a few pages - services, prices, contact: 1 to 2 weeks.
• A site with booking or enquiry flows and content you can edit yourself: 2 to 3 weeks.
• A larger build with several sections, integrations and AI support: 3 to 4 weeks.
• Anything with e-commerce, custom systems or several decision-makers: longer, and it should be quoted as a project rather than a package.

Those are our own timelines and they hold when a project runs normally. What follows is where the weeks actually go, so you can see which parts you control.

Where the time goes

1. Before anything: the audit and the call

   A day or two. We look at what you have now - site, Google listing, how enquiries reach you - and then talk it through. The output is a written scope: what is being built, what it costs, what you need to provide. Nothing is designed until this is agreed, because designing before it is agreed is how projects double in length.

2. Week one: structure and design

   What the site is made of and what it looks like. You see the design before it is built, not after. This is the cheapest possible moment to change your mind, and the stage where saying "actually, the prices should come first" costs nothing.

3. Week one to two: the build

   The design becomes a real, working site - fast on a phone, readable, with the forms and buttons wired up to reach you. Most of the invisible work happens here: speed, search tags, accessibility, the things nobody notices until they are missing.

4. Week two to three: AI, automation and content loading

   Where relevant - an assistant trained on your own prices and hours, enquiry routing, the systems that mean a lead does not sit unread. Your real content goes in, replacing the placeholder text.

5. Final days: review, fixes and launch

   You go through it properly. We fix what comes back, test it across phones and browsers, connect the domain and put it live. Then thirty days of free fixes, because things surface in the first month of real use that no amount of testing finds.

What actually causes delays

In our experience almost every project that runs long runs long for one of four reasons, and only one of them is about building.

• Content. Photos, menus, service descriptions, staff names, the paragraph about who you are. This is the single biggest cause, every time. A build cannot finish around a page with nothing in it.
• Feedback speed. A round of comments returned the same day and a round returned in ten days produce the same site, a week and a half apart.
• Too many decision-makers. Two people who disagree politely will add a week without anyone noticing it happening.
• Scope changes mid-build. A new page, an online shop, a booking system that was not in the scope - all reasonable, all a new timeline. We will always tell you what a change costs in days as well as in pounds.

How to get live faster

If a date matters - a shop opening, a season, a campaign - these are the things that genuinely move it, in order of how much difference they make.

1. Get your content together before the build starts

   Photos, prices, opening hours, services, and a rough paragraph about the business in your own words. It does not need polishing - we do that. It needs to exist. A client who arrives with this is often a full week ahead.

2. Name one decision-maker

   One person who can say yes. Everyone else advises them. This alone removes more delay than any other single change.

3. Give feedback in one batch

   One list, everything on it, rather than seven messages over five days. Faster for you, and it means we change things once instead of three times.

4. Launch smaller, then grow

   A tight site live this month beats an ambitious one live in the spring. The blog, the shop and the second language can be added to a site that is already working for you.