TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
How long does it take to build a website? For most small businesses, three to six weeks from kickoff to launch, and the design is almost never the part that holds it up. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites, and this is one of the first questions in nearly every conversation I have. People ask because they have a date in mind: a grand opening, a busy season, a rebrand, a trade show. That date matters more than most people say out loud, so it is worth knowing where the weeks actually go.
There are really two timelines in every project. There is the number of hours of work the site takes, which I can estimate closely. And there is the calendar time from the first call to a live URL, which depends almost entirely on how fast decisions and content move. Those two numbers are never the same, and the gap between them is where almost every late launch lives.
The short answer, by size of site
Assuming content is ready or close to it, and feedback comes back within a couple of days, here is what I plan for:
- A single landing page: one to two weeks.
- A starter site of about five pages: three to four weeks.
- A full business site of ten to twenty pages: six to ten weeks.
- An online store: eight to twelve weeks, sometimes longer, because products, shipping rules, and payments are their own project.
- A rebuild that keeps the existing content: often faster than any of the above, because the hard thinking is already done.
Those are calendar weeks, not billed hours. A five page site is nowhere close to four weeks of work for me. It is more like a week of build time spread across a month, because the project breathes in and out while you review pages, gather photos, and get back to me between the work that actually pays you.
Where the time actually goes
A build has four stages and they are not the same size. Discovery and planning takes a few days to a week. That is where we settle what the site needs to do, who it is for, what pages it needs, and what should happen when someone lands on it. It looks like the least productive stage and it saves the most time, because every hour spent deciding here is an hour not spent rebuilding something in week five.
Design runs about a week for most small sites. I design the homepage first, we settle the look on that one page, and the rest of the pages inherit decisions we already made. That goes fast when the first round of feedback is decisive and slowly when it is not.
The build itself is the most predictable stage of the whole thing, usually one to two weeks. Predictable because nothing is being invented by then, it is only being made. Then launch week: testing, forms, phones, speed, redirects if we are replacing an old site, and a walkthrough so you can actually use the thing. Give that a few days, and do not plan to launch and leave town the same afternoon.
The part that decides your launch date is content
Design and code have deadlines I control. Content does not, and content is the thing people underestimate. Words for every page, photos of your actual work, staff names and titles, service descriptions, prices if you show them, the fine print on your policies. It sounds small written out like that. It is the single most common reason a four week project turns into a three month one.
It is not that clients are slow. Writing about your own business is genuinely hard, it competes with the work that pays the bills, and it never feels urgent until it is the only thing left. I have had finished sites sit for six weeks waiting on one page of copy and a headshot. A few habits fix most of it:
- Write the rough version yourself and let me tidy it. A messy draft from you beats a polished draft from someone who does not know your business.
- Book photos early. A photographer's next opening is often three weeks out, which can be your entire timeline.
- Decide who signs off before we start. One decision maker is fast, three is a committee, and committees add weeks.
- Send things in one batch instead of a trickle. Ten small emails cost more days than one big one.
What makes a build slip
- Scope that grows quietly. Every 'while we are in there' item is real work with a real deadline attached.
- Feedback that arrives in fragments over two weeks instead of in one pass.
- Waiting on somebody else: a photographer, a copywriter, a franchise approval, a lawyer reviewing terms.
- Logins nobody can find. Domain registrar, old hosting, analytics. These always surface during launch week.
- Changing direction after the design is approved. It is allowed, it is sometimes right, and it costs the days it costs.
None of these are disasters. They are the honest reasons a timeline moves, and every one of them is easier to absorb when it is named up front instead of discovered in week five.
How to make your build go faster
- Track down your domain and hosting logins this week, before anything else starts.
- Pick your five most important pages and let the rest come after launch. A live five page site beats a perfect twelve page site still sitting in drafts.
- Book the photos now, even if you have not chosen a designer yet.
- Block one hour to review each round and send all of your notes in a single message.
- Say what your real deadline is and why. A grand opening is a different constraint than 'soon,' and I plan differently for it.
Launch day is not the finish line
One more thing worth putting on the calendar. The day your site goes live, Google does not know it exists. Indexing takes anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and ranking for anything competitive takes months of the site simply existing and being useful. Google's own guidance on asking it to recrawl your URLs is blunt that even a direct request can take days or longer to process.
So if the real goal is to be found on Google by October, your website deadline is not October. It is meaningfully earlier, and the site is the start of that work rather than the end of it.
What to put on the calendar
If you want one number: six weeks from the day you say go, for a normal small business site, assuming you can turn content and feedback around within a couple of days. Faster is possible. I have launched sites in a week when the scope was tight and the content was already written. Slower happens too, and it is almost always content.
If you have a hard date, say so in the first conversation instead of after the quote. Most timelines can be worked backward from a real deadline when we know about it early, sometimes by trimming the launch scope and adding pages later. You can see what a website costs alongside how long it takes, and if you are staring at a date you are worried about, tell me about it and I will tell you honestly whether it is doable.