What Kind of Website Do You Want To Build
Building a website can be very stressful and exciting. You have an idea, or a new business, or even your business is about to take it to the next level. Your website is the most important piece of your online presence. A lot of people stop when it goes to making a website because they do not know where to start. They may not know where to go or how much it costs. Most importantly, how long does it take to build a website? Some will build on a popular platform. Some might just hire a website builder.
The first step to think about when building a website is to identify what you are trying to do. What kind of value you are going to provide, and how you can get your idea out in the world? Perhaps you are a business and you need a business website done with just the most basic functionality. You may even just want a blog where you talk about what makes you happy and passionate.
Defining What You Are Going To Need
If you are running an ecommerce business, you will have to make even higher efforts to succeed. You will likely need a ton of functionality like to get you results at high cost. That is just the basic value. All in all, you want it to look good and be seen.
Depending on the level of functionality, you are looking into a decent time window for a successful website. The time investment will be a decent amount looking into your industry, and how your website can be better. Timing on a website is all about what you are hoping to accomplish. Trusting the process that even in fact, the work is never done after bringing it out to the world.
Be Prepared For More Work Than Just Putting It Together
Already, we are going into some altitudes of serious thought here. Serious thought takes serious time. By doing it right, you need to have all the bells and whistles taken care of with an action plan. Once you have your first branding idea or finalized branding idea you will need to have your research done.
It is a lot of work and we would like to discuss the importance of understanding timing and intuition. That way, you understand why it might take long in terms of how long it takes to build a website. The hardest part to understand is that a website is never necessarily done.
The Importance of Understanding Timing and Intuition
Timing is key. Do you have one hour? Or perhaps two hours? Maybe three? How much time can you put in a day to figure out your branding, content. Or even what kind of website do you need? You need to have several hours to go through the ultimate test of building a successful website. What tech are you going to use? There are also many more questions to ask as well.
All that matters is intuition. We solve one problem at a time and we get right to work. When it comes up to how long it takes to build a website, you need intuition, good timing, and results. You already made the decision that you want a new website. Now you need to take the steps to solve problem by problem to achieve your goal. Commit to your brand, believe in your brand, believe in yourself, your employees, your product, your service, your business. All of the answers will be clear step by step.
Have What It Takes?
If you want to build a successful website, you need grit. You must make the necessary investment in time or money to succeed. You want to have everything set. With timing and intuition solving one problem at a time, your website will be built in good time. Trust the process! Have fun! That is all there is to it.
We have seen that it can take up as soon as one week to build an ok website. But it only gets ok results. Otherwise, it can take up to eight to twelve weeks to build an extraordinary website. We have fun with every single website we build because that is what we love to do! The timing, the intuition, the faith, and the continued hard work. It’s fun and exciting! Let’s talk about custom websites, and then a basic website like a WordPress Website.
How Long To Build a Custom Website
Building a custom website from scratch requires coding skills. You need to know several programming languages and have a tech department ready. This process makes it longer simply because you are building from scratch. Programs online like WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and many more website page builders online have functionalities already built to handle a website’s basic needs.
You also may need to reevaluate why you need a customized website from scratch above using another available one. If you need, it that is fine, but it comes with a pretty hefty investment in either time or money. When asking yourself how long to build a custom website, the smartest move if you want results done sooner, is to hire a website builder that can handle such customized needs.
A Far More Difficult and Time-Consuming Solution
What you will need to do after you have done the domain research and branding as we will mention below is pick out a server-side programming language. You’ll be choosing a database of choice, and technology stack that the website will serve in. You then would need to build the database. Then, do any server-side programming to build an in-house content management system for the website content to resolve. With the backend built, now you can start on what the front of the website will look like in terms of design. Then, gather all of your content and going to work with what you built with.
Tech-Stacks and The Verdict On The Timing of a Custom Website
Sometimes, you can even build with just a front-end technology stack like Angular or React (JavaScript Framework and Library) just to code the website out. You can even use other Headless Content Management Systems to use for content management. You can do that with Google Firebase, and amongst other services available online. Regardless, it is going to be much harder if you have no programming experience to build out a custom website. With them being done from scratch it will take more time. We estimate a proper one built in a minimum of 3 months. And the price is going to be a little higher because of the customized features included.
How Long Does It Take To Build a Basic Website
Now that we have gone over the complications of building a custom website and how long it takes to build a custom website, let’s talk about how long does it take to build a basic website. You can build a pretty basic website fairly quickly on Google Websites, GoDaddy Page Builder, WordPress Page Builders (we recommend WP Engine Hosting), Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, and many other website programs out there. We recommend using WordPress. It has its learning curve, but it gives you the best bang for your buck. You can add plugins or themes that are going to complement your branding but also help you achieve your goals.
Our WordPress Recommendation and a Verdict on Timing
WordPress has outstanding plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast, Gravity Forms, and many more plugins that are going to help you automate and simplify the process of building a website. When thinking about how long does it take to build a website at the very basic standard even with no website experience, it can take you from one week to three months. It really depends on what you are trying to do.
A basic website to us, is a 5 page website, with blogging capabilities, a contact form, and that’s it. Although in these times, we might recommend more features. We recommend more time invested in the website the best results follow. You want the best possible website you can put out there. When you do it right even for a small basic website, you are looking at least around one week.
Domain Research and Branding
Now that we have gone over custom vs basic web design and how long they each take, let’s discuss about the first step after you have made the decision to build a website. When you have your brand name ready, we suggest you go to godaddy.com. Search your brand name and see if it is available there. If it is available there, make sure there are no incorporations. Check if other brands online have the same name. It would be better if your brand was unique and stood out amongst your competitors. We recommend a unique name for your brand.
Once you have decided and verified your brand’s domain name, just give it a purchase. We recommend domain protection so your domain is secure in your registration period. Now that we have a domain, we need to get to work on a logo and branding. We have in-house logo designers that can get you concepts in days. You can easily find AI or freelance logo designers available to design your logo for your brand right now.
The Importance of your Logo
Designing the logo is going to be a challenge because that is going to lead to two more important pieces. Typography, and Color Schemes. When making your logo, we recommend you seriously do some homework on fonts and colors. They really do make a difference and if your concept is as sound as you think. You might want to think about it very hard. In this phase, we do things much differently, we do a complete dive in on your competition. We focus on why they are successful, and how we can be more successful than them.
Do a lot of homework in this time. That is going to make things much easier for you throughout the process. We recommend doing this homework before speaking to a logo designer. That helps them solve your problem much quicker.
Now that you have branding prepared. It is time to rock and roll on taglines and find your way to building your website. A massive investment of time already here might make you think twice on why it might take long to build a website and how ridiculous it sounds. When thinking about how long does it take to build a website, keep in mind your name and branding come first. Research, content generation, and designing are not physical web application processes. These are time-consuming steps in themselves. Next, let’s address the website content!
Getting Website Content
Getting website content depending on how you want to represent yourself online takes from a couple of days (if you have the time), or weeks. When it comes to one-week website builds, we have seen that they are lacking. Missing big time on content and SEO advantages that can make them stand out amongst their competition. We never recommend doing one day or one week. Some web designers today will not accept work unless you have your logo, typography preferences, color schemes, and even how you want it to look.
Content takes serious time and thought. Remember intuition? This is where you got to get your hands dirty, and get right to work. The words are not going to write themselves (well, maybe not in 2023). You need words to convince your customers or audience to have an agreement with your message. Solve someone’s problem or get a person intrigued with what you are trying to say. You need to do some homework on what people are looking for in your niche so you know what to say. Keep in mind that Search Engines will read your website so make your content unique, and passionate!
Write, write, write! Write out your pages to the fullest extent and double check, triple check and quadruple check your work. If you have this done in good time, you really have stretched out your brain muscles and you might need some relaxation. Sometimes, it takes weeks to write the verbiage for the website before even getting assets ready for the website based on your branding.
The Design and Your Assets
Photos and videos are an outstanding piece to the puzzle of building a website. You will probably need to take pictures of your products, your location, yourself, and your team members. You would massively benefit from having a few videos available too. Content or verbiage reads some words, pictures reads a thousand words, and videos read millions of words. You definitely should consider having this all available before working on your website.
Web Design before Building and Development is a Process Too
Most agencies depending on the package that you will work with might ask for pictures, videos, and verbiage before working on the website. Having this all available is going to take time, so do not be shy, and smile for that camera. Getting graphics is going to be hard if you are not going to hire a graphic design company that will assemble such important things for you on your website.
When looking for a template for your website, keep in mind about all the work you have done for your branding, verbiage, graphics, pictures and videos. Make sure you find some thing that is going to stand out for your brand and appreciate the work you have already done.
There are several template builders or template designs you can view online like Awwwards or Dribble that can get you a good concept in mind. Most web designers either use those websites for inspiration, or they with their outstanding talents, design it themselves from scratch. Keep in mind that when you have a web designer doing this for you, there is so much work they are going to do more than having you pick a template and sticking to it if you are looking for a custom web design where the designer is going to build from scratch.
Be Consistent On Your Design Choices
Remember that in your decision, you need to stick to it. Just because the landing page has one look, does not mean you take such a left turn, it looks like a completely different website. Stay consistent on your decision such as everything you have accomplished so far. How soon can they find the solution to their problem, does the heading text answer their question or intrigue them enough? There are so many altitudes as to how your web design is going to get your users to either call you or order online for your products and services.
Disclaimer
In most projects done by any agency, the agency will get the logo designed, typography, and landing page (home page) of your website designed on a Figma or PhotoShop template for presentation which takes sometimes some weeks to do. This reinforces the idea that one week website builds don’t get it done. Although these steps are considered branding, they are all big parts of the website. You might be thinking NOW we are getting to the building the website part? Yes. Absolutely! We recommend you have these pieces done before or at least during the process of when your website is being worked on.
Now that we have made it this far, let’s discuss how long does it take to build a website. That is, when you have your branding, domain, and assets available. When you’re thinking about how long it takes to build a website, you must not and cannot forget to have these important things done.
Building the Website
Fun fact. Everything above this is all part of building the website. But building the website itself is basically the next big step. If you have decided to go the custom route completely, expect months and investments being done. If you have decided to go with something available online in terms of your tech-stack such as our recommendation with WordPress, you can get this step done in a week or two depending on your skill set. Most web designers, if they have everything can get it done in a day with building the website or at least one week.
Getting Started and ECommerce vs Regular Websites
Once you have your base (Header, Footer, Page Structure, and Navigation Systems), you can go about building your pages out. The base can take hours or even an entire day to do depending on how complex and the type of website being built. Business websites can now be done much sooner page-by-page depending on what level of functionality you require. The more the functionality and more pages, the more time it takes to put together the website.
Ecommerce websites might take longer than normal business websites. You basically are building a store online. A door where people can walk in with product they can buy and information about product they can understand about and then a cart and checkout system that can process sales. ECommerce websites is built with more functionality and more time is put in to make sure payments can be processed, and much more.
You are going to have a little more time invested because you are not just describing your business like we recommend every ecommerce website do, but you need to have serious time with your Product Pages. You’re going to need functionality such as One-Step Checkout, Empty Cart Emailing, Subscriptions, Bulk Product Offering and so much more to convince the user they can get in and out with a trustworthy store that can get them the most value.
Hidden Value in Blogging
We think every website should have a blog or a multitude of articles written. It is important to inform your customers about your products and services. You should invest in as much blog posts you can talk about your products and services. Assuming you have this written, it does not take long to add it to the website. If it’s WordPress, its so simple. If you have this done for your website, not only you are competing better for ranking online, but you are also getting more messages to your customers that are going to answer their questions getting you more trust and respect.
Concluding The Initial Build
We will admit there is much more to it with building the website than what he had just mentioned, but to understand how long it takes to build a website, is to understand different types and what you need for it to be successful. It is estimated that it takes up to one week to build a website if you have everything you need unless you do not want to review the work done and see what can be done better or if a revision is needed before publicly launching to the world.
We did not go over microsites as of course, do not take as much time as business websites, or ecommerce websites. When it comes to timing with your website, you must remember the more functionality and content, the more time it is going to take. You must remember too that it is okay if there is more work to do. You need your idea, service, or product to stand out. The more time you put into building a successful website, the more it will be worth it in the long run.
Revising Your Website To Be The Best and Pre-Launch
The part that is most critical. The revision process. Depending on your agency or who you are working with revision is not simple. If it is a custom website, there might be drawbacks that can delay the launch for sometime. That is why we recommend you make sure you that you know absolutely everything you need to do before picking your type of website. You have seen it, and there is definitely going to need to have some work done to it.
We recommend our clients to go through thoroughly and take an entire week to review the website and give us a list of changes before going publicly live. Otherwise, depending on our agreement, we may would need to charge an additional fee for another round of revisions.
In all things business there are always going to be problems, and when there are problems, there always solutions to solve the said problems. Go one step at a time, and get one problem solved each time, and before you know it, you are ready for pre-launch. In our pre-launch phase, we go through one final review and do a QA Session before going live just to be sure. We also install and recommend installing Google Analytics right away so when we are live, we can verify with Google Search Console.
Launching Your Website
Now that we have the website built, we are likely at least three weeks in, and we are reviewing one last time, we have decided, let’s go for it! Launching a website does not have to be long, but sometimes, it can take some time for propagation for your domain to resolve on the new server it is moving to if you have an existing website. We have seen the launch process for us takes us up to 5 hours to verify a successful launch. Make sure before launching your metadata, schema data, and sitemap is ready for Google and other search engines to read!
After launch, we watch the website like a hawk to make sure all software, traffic, and pages are resolving correctly. During this process, we install Google Search Console (we massively recommend this) and integrate other Webmaster Tools that are going to help you rank much higher down the road. Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms daily to improve for their customers, which means you will need to keep an eye and adapt to such changes so you don’t miss out on your customers.
At this point we are about at least a month in, and it is time to double and triple-check everything one last time before declaring it to the world. Now that we have declared it to the world, it is time to make the website better! When thinking about how long does it take to build a website, we always think about this promise land, we think about the promise land of making you money. Let’s talk about that important step!
Post-Website Work To Do
This is the part where we tell you the website is never done and you should always be working on it to improve for your customers. We are one month in and we are looking about how we could make it better and that it is consitently prepared for ranking higher on search engines so you are found and can get more opportunities.
We recommend looking to make sure your website’s health is in the company of the top 10% of the websites in the world, that will get you to rank faster. Following this, you should keep up to date on your website’s content and get to making sure your message is the best on the web! After this, do some outreach, talk about your website, get some traffic from other websites or through social media. After putting in all the effort to build the website, you should not be afraid to put your self out there.
A Quick Verdict:
- Micro Website: 1 Week Minimum, 3 Weeks Maximum (Depending on Availability of Content and Intuition)
- Blogger Website: 3 Weeks Minimum, 12 Weeks Maximum (Depending on Availability of Content and Intuition)
- Business Website: 3 Weeks Minimum, 12 Weeks Maximum (Depending on Availability of Content and Intuition)
- ECommerce Website: 4 Weeks Minimum, 14 Weeks Maximum (Depending on Availability of Content and Intuition)
- Member Website: 5 Weeks Minimum, 14 Weeks Maximum (Depending on Availability of Content and Intuition)
- Custom Website: 12 Weeks Minimum, 24Weeks Maximum (Depending on Availability of Content and Intuition)
An Agency Doing It For You and the Final Verdict!
Depending on the agency, and how much team members they have on staff, your website could be done in three weeks and with good quality in thought and application. No matter the process, we have seen quality websites built in the minimum of three weeks. It is important to remember that this, like any other service or work being done is a process and requires grit and hard work like most any other work.
When it comes up to building the best possible website, you have to remember about building it with a good price in mind. Rather it be your time or in your investment. If you have built the best website with no spend on any agency, we congratulate you, because it is a lot work. If you have any questions about how the best website can be built with the best possible price, we can get you the answers, even if you are just curious.
How long does it take to build a website? keep in mind like anything else in the world that this does take time. Three weeks minimum and six months maximum is our verdict! We hope that this helps answer your question and if you have any questions along the way, ask away in the comments section below and we can help you at the best capacity.
