How Long Does It Take to Build a Website?
Real calendar timeframes for a brochure site, a standard business site and an ecommerce build, what happens in each phase, and the honest reason most projects run late.
A simple brochure website takes one to three weeks. A standard ten to twenty page business site takes four to eight weeks. An ecommerce build runs eight to sixteen weeks. Those are calendar weeks, not hours of work. And the biggest variable is almost never the developer. It is how quickly you supply content, photos and decisions.
What are the realistic timeframes for each type of website?
The table below assumes a normal working relationship: you reply within a couple of days, you already have a logo, and you are not waiting on a rebrand or a new business name to be registered. These are calendar weeks, not billable hours. A five page site might only involve twenty five to thirty hours of actual work spread over three weeks, because most of that fortnight is spent waiting on something.
| Website type | Realistic timeframe | What drives the variation |
|---|---|---|
| One page site or landing page | 3 to 7 days | Whether the copy already exists and whether you need photography |
| Small brochure site, 3 to 5 pages | 1 to 3 weeks | Content readiness, number of design revision rounds |
| Standard business site, 10 to 20 pages | 4 to 8 weeks | Sitemap decisions, who writes the service pages, approval speed |
| Service business with suburb or location pages, 20 to 40 pages | 6 to 10 weeks | Volume of near duplicate content that still has to be written properly |
| Ecommerce, up to 100 products | 8 to 16 weeks | Product data quality, images, shipping rules, payment and tax setup |
| Ecommerce, 500 plus products or a data import | 12 to 24 weeks | Migration and data cleanup, integrations with accounting or stock systems |
| Redesign of an existing site with URL migration | 5 to 10 weeks | Redirect mapping, how much old content is kept, rewritten or dropped |
| Custom build with bookings, portals or an API | 12 to 24 weeks | Scope creep, third party system quirks, testing cycles |
Read the right hand column first, because that is where your project actually lives. Two businesses can order an identical fifteen page site from the same team in the same month. One launches in five weeks. The other launches in five months. Nothing about the build changed.
What actually happens during those weeks?
Every build we run breaks into five stages, and only one of them is what most people picture when they think about making a website. Knowing the shape of it helps you see where your own time gets spent, and where a delay in week two quietly becomes a delay in week seven.
Discovery and sitemap: 3 to 7 days
Working out what pages exist, what each one is meant to make a visitor do, and what happens when someone enquires. It is a short stage and an unforgiving one. Change the sitemap in week six and you have thrown away design work, navigation work and half the internal linking. Change it on day four and it costs nothing but a conversation.
Design: 1 to 2 weeks
Usually a homepage concept plus one or two inner page templates, then a round of revisions. Two rounds is normal. Four rounds means the brief was wrong, and the fix is to go back to the brief rather than push more pixels around. Most of the calendar time here is sitting in your inbox waiting to be looked at, not sitting on a designer’s screen.
Content: 2 to 4 weeks, running alongside everything
This is the long pole, and it does not have to be. Copy for every page, photos of your team and your work, staff bios, service descriptions, price lists, testimonials, the terms and conditions your industry requires. If we write the copy it takes about a week per five pages plus your review. If you write it, it takes as long as you take, which is honestly the whole problem in one sentence.
Build: 1 to 3 weeks
The part everybody thinks is the whole job. Templates get built in WordPress, pages get populated, forms get connected, tracking goes on, the mobile layouts get sorted. For a standard business site this is genuinely two weeks of focused work. Ecommerce takes longer because shipping tables, tax settings and payment gateways all need testing rather than just building.
Testing and launch: 4 to 7 days, then a day
Cross browser checks, mobile on real devices rather than a resized window, form submissions landing in the right inbox, speed, SSL, redirects from the old URLs, analytics firing. Then launch itself, which for a site on hosting we control is an afternoon. Give it two more weeks of watching afterwards. Something small always surfaces once real people start using it.
Book the boring infrastructure in early. If your .com.au domain sits with a registrar you no longer have the login for, recovering it can take a week or more, and it is the one task nobody can rush on your behalf. Same with email: moving mail hosting on launch day is how businesses lose a morning of enquiries. Sort domain access in week one, not the night before go live.
Why do website projects really run late?
Content and feedback. That is it. In twenty years of building sites for Australian businesses, the overwhelming majority of overdue projects were waiting on the client, not the builder. The site sits at ninety per cent finished with grey placeholder boxes where the team photos go and dummy text on two service pages, and it sits there for six weeks.
It is not laziness. Writing about your own business is genuinely hard, and it always loses to the work that pays this week. But the effect is brutal: a build that was scoped at five weeks becomes a four month drag, momentum dies, the person who was excited in January has stopped opening the emails by April, and everyone ends up mildly annoyed with everyone else.
Agencies are not blameless. We have been the bottleneck ourselves, usually by taking on too much in November and December, or by not chasing hard enough when a client went quiet. A decent builder should be ringing you by day ten of silence, not sending a fourth polite email. If you want to see how we structure a build so this does not happen, that is covered in the way we run a website build.
Can a website genuinely be built in a week?
Yes, under specific conditions. We do it regularly. A three to five page site, an existing logo, copy either supplied on day one or written from a single sixty minute interview, stock or supplied photography, one template family rather than bespoke design for every page, and one person on your side who can approve things on the spot.
What cannot be done in a week: an ecommerce store with real product data, anything requiring a photoshoot, a site that depends on a booking system talking to your existing software, or a migration off an old site where three hundred URLs need redirecting. Those are not slow because of effort. They are slow because they involve other people, other systems, and testing that only reveals problems once you run it. And a one week site is a starting point rather than a finished asset: it gets you trading, then you spend the next two months adding the service pages and case studies that make it rank.
What does a rushed build actually cost you later?
Rushing rarely breaks the website. It breaks the parts of the website that earn money, because those are the parts that get cut when the clock runs out. Design gets signed off, the build gets done, and the thinking gets skipped.
The usual damage:
- Thin service pages that never rank, so you pay for Google Ads indefinitely to make up for organic traffic you should have had
- A sitemap invented in a hurry, which means restructuring the site in eighteen months and dealing with redirects then instead of now
- Forms that were never tested properly against a real inbox and spam filter, quietly losing enquiries for months
- No tracking, so you cannot tell which pages generate work and cannot make an informed decision about anything
- Photography left as stock images of American offices, which Australian buyers spot instantly and quietly discount you for
Rebuilding a section properly later costs more than doing it once, and the lost enquiries in between are money you will never see. If a deadline is forcing the cut, cut pages instead of quality. Launch six good pages and add the rest over the next quarter. Six good pages beat eighteen average ones on every measure that matters, which is worth thinking through alongside the rest of our guides on planning a website.
How do you speed up a website build without wrecking it?
Four things, and they are all on your side of the fence. None of them cost money.
- Settle the sitemap before design starts. Every page, named, in order, with a one line note on what it is for. Argue about it in week one when it is free.
- Start the content while the design is still being drawn. Even rough dot points per page are enough to build against, and rough beats absent by a mile.
- Nominate one decision maker. Not a committee, not the owner plus the office manager plus the owner’s daughter who did a graphic design course. One person, with authority, who signs off.
- Batch your feedback. Read the whole thing, write one consolidated list, send it once. Six emails over four days each containing one change turn a two hour revision into a two day one, and that is how a fortnight disappears.
A fifth if you can manage it: block two hours in your diary each week, same slot, treated like a client appointment. Clients who do that finish on schedule. It is the strongest predictor we see.
What if you have a hard launch date?
Work backwards, and be pessimistic. If you need a fifteen page site live on 1 October, start in early August at the latest, because eight weeks of build needs a fortnight of buffer sitting behind it. If you need it live for a trade show or a seasonal run like spring for a landscaper or June for anything tax related, add another two weeks again, since those deadlines cannot move and yours will.
Tell whoever is quoting about the deadline at the enquiry stage, not after you have signed. It changes what should be built, in what order, and whether a staged launch makes more sense. We would rather scope a smaller site that lands on time than a bigger one that lands in November. If you have a date to hit, start with a scoped web design and build and let the deadline shape the scope rather than the other way around.
Rule of thumb for quotes: if a proposal gives you a timeframe with no dependencies attached to it, be sceptical. A realistic quote says something like six weeks from receipt of your content, and names the dates you owe things by. A quote that just says six weeks is a quote that has not thought about who is actually going to be late.
Common questions
How long does a WordPress site take compared to Wix or Squarespace?
For a professionally built site the difference is small, maybe a week. WordPress needs hosting, security and plugin setup that Wix and Squarespace handle for you, which adds a few days at the start. Where WordPress wins the time back is on anything non standard, because you are not waiting to discover the platform cannot do it. DIY on any platform is a different question: most people take two to four weekends, and stall on the copy.
Do I need every word written before the build starts?
No, but you need the sitemap locked and the homepage copy close to final. Everything else can arrive page by page during the build as long as it keeps arriving. What kills a timeline is content showing up in one enormous batch at the end, or a page nobody realised needed writing until the builder went looking for it. Dot points are enough to start with. Blank is not.
How long after launch before my site shows up on Google?
Indexing usually happens within a few days to two weeks once the sitemap is submitted in Search Console, and searching your business name should find you fairly quickly. Ranking for competitive service terms is a different timeline entirely, typically three to six months of consistent work, longer in crowded markets like Sydney trades or legal. Nobody can guarantee positions, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
Can we launch in stages?
Yes, and it is often the smart call. Launch the homepage, your top two or three service pages, an about page and contact, then add the rest over the following two months. You start collecting enquiries weeks earlier and Google starts seeing the site sooner. The one condition is a written plan for stage two with dates, otherwise stage one becomes permanent and the site stays half built forever.
Does a redesign take less time than a brand new site?
Usually a little, but less than people expect. You save on discovery and often on content, since much of it can be reworked rather than written from scratch. You spend that saving on migration: mapping old URLs to new ones, moving posts, preserving rankings, and deciding what gets retired. Budget five to ten weeks for a typical business site redesign, and insist on seeing the redirect map before launch.
What happens if the project runs over the agreed timeframe?
Ask before you sign. A fair arrangement states what each side owes and by when, with a clause covering what happens if content stalls, commonly the project pausing and rejoining the queue rather than the price going up. Any decent agreement should also let you walk away without penalty. We do not lock people into contracts, and we would be wary of anyone whose timeline promises only bind you.
Need a website live by a certain date?
Tell us the date and what the site has to do, and we will tell you honestly whether it is achievable and what would have to be staged. Sydney based, building websites for Australian businesses since 2004, no lock-in contracts.