How Long Does It Take to Build a Website for Your Business?

You’re ready to get your business online, but how long does it take to build a website?

You know it’s important to go beyond the Facebook pages and Instagram profile, but isn’t it hard to build a website? Won’t it take you a long time to get everything together?

While it can be challenging to get started if you’re a complete novice, we can give you some tips to make it take less time. Continue reading this article to learn more about how long it takes to build a business website.

Figure Out the Type of Website You’re Building

Before you can start figuring out how long it will take to build a successful website design, you need to know what type of website it is. Depending on the type of website, the timeframe can vary greatly.

Basic Information

If you’re just communicating some basic information, your website might only be 5-10 pages. You’ll still have to do the design and write the content, but a website with a lot more pages is going to take a lot more time.

The basic information sites usually don’t have an in-depth design either. In fact, you may be able to use a template to get the website up and running pretty quickly.

Lead Generation

Do you plan on using your website for lead generation? When you want to use your website for lead generation, it needs to encourage people to enter their information, so you can stay in touch with them.

These websites need to have at least 15-20 different pages with information targeted at your specific audience. These types of websites need to be search engine optimized, so people can find your content online and learn about what you’re doing.

E-commerce

An e-commerce website is designed to sell physical products online. Usually, these sites will have at least 25 pages, but depending on how many products you have, you might have more or less.

The Web Design Process

While no one can tell you exactly how long it will take to build your website, it will usually take around 3-4 months. The faster you are at helping your designer with the information and other things they need from you, the faster it will get finished.

Figuring Out Your Needs

Before any technical work can get started, your website designer will work with you to figure out what your needs are. There are no two companies alike, and they will have a lot of questions to help you figure out what is best for you.

You may not need a big fancy website, but on the other hand, you might. Talk it out with them and tell them what your vision is, and they’ll let you know how they can help you make it come to life.

Content Creation

Creating content is one of the important parts of the website design process. When you’re asking, “How long does it take to make a website?” you might forget about the content creation part of things.

Writers have to create web copy for your website from the home page, about page, and beyond. If you want blog content written, they also need to write that, and it can take a while, depending on how much content you want.

Website Design

In the design part of the process, the designer will make sure everything on the site serves a purpose. You shouldn’t just have buttons there if there isn’t a real reason for you to have them. Unnecessary elements bog down your website speed and hurt the user experience.

Optimization

User experience (UX) is important, and so is search engine optimization (SEO). The optimization part of the process focuses on both UX and SEO, so you’ll be able to get the most people to your website, and you’ll be able to provide them a good experience.

Testing

There are so many browsers for people to use and many different devices. If you don’t test them, they might not be showing up on those devices or browsers properly, and you would never know.

Make sure your website designer makes your website mobile-friendly. It is extremely important for user experience and for ranking in the search engines.

Website Launch

Once all of that is done, it’s time to launch the website. It’s no longer going to be in the staging area, and soon you or your website designer will hit the button and make it go live.

This part of the process means taking it from one server to another. Make sure it’s backed up before you try moving it in case anything goes wrong.

Once your website is on the right server, you’ll be able to point your domain to the server, and everyone will be able to type it in and view your website.

Prepare to Have Patience

Now that you know what goes into the process, it will make much more sense to you when you learn it can take around 3-4 months to build a custom website with 15-20 pages.

Yes, this does take a while, but you need to have a website that looks great and functions well. If you are going to build a more complicated website, it could take longer than this, but this is the average time it will take to build a website.