How long does it take to build a small business website?

Ask around and you'll hear anything from a fortnight to six months. Both are true, and the difference almost never comes down to how fast anyone can build.

It comes down to how many decisions are left open, and who is waiting on whom.

What actually takes the time

Here's where the weeks go on a typical small business build.

Waiting for your words. This is the biggest one by a mile. The designer sends a content questionnaire. It asks you to write about your business, your services, your history. You put it aside because you're busy and because writing about yourself is genuinely horrible. Three weeks pass. Nothing has been built, and it's nobody's fault.

Waiting for photos. Same pattern. "Send us some images" turns into a hunt through your phone, then a plan to take better ones, then a month.

Design by committee. Two rounds of revisions sounds efficient until you realise each round is a week of you looking at it, a week of changes, and a meeting to agree.

The domain and email. Frequently discovered at the end. Nobody can find the login for a domain bought in 2016 by a cousin, and a transfer takes days.

Notice that only one of those is building. The rest is waiting.

How five days is possible

We start from the opposite end. Instead of describing a website to somebody and waiting to see what comes back. You pick your trade and a mockup appears, not your site, but a picture of how a business like yours could look online.

That does two things to the clock. You already know roughly what you're getting, so there's no round of "can we see a concept first". And we've already worked out how a site for your trade should be laid out, so nobody is designing from a blank page. Your own site is then built from your words, your photos and your prices.

Then:

We write the words. You correct them. You don't fill in a document. You tell us what you do, however it comes out, a phone call, a text, a voice note between jobs. We turn it into proper copy and you tell us what we got wrong. Correcting is enormously easier than writing, and it's the single biggest reason the timeline collapses.

Photos are optional to start. If you have them, send them. If you don't. We go live without them and add them later. A site with no photos beats no site.

One round, not four. You see it. You tell us what to change, we change it.

So: say yes and you're up by day five. Under a week from yes to a business anyone can find.

What makes it take longer

We'd rather be straight about this.

More pages. Five pages is the standard build. If you want a page for each of ten services. That's more writing and it will take longer than five days. We'll tell you the real date rather than promise five and miss.

Waiting on the domain. If you don't own one yet, buying it is quick, but DNS changes can take a day or so to settle. If you're moving an existing domain, add a few days.

You being unreachable. The build is fast because the loop is fast. If we can't reach you for a week, day five becomes day twelve. That's the only dependency we can't remove.

Rebuilds are usually faster, not slower

People assume replacing an existing site takes longer. It's often quicker, because the words already exist. We start from what's on your current site, keep what works, and you're not writing from scratch.

Your existing email keeps working the whole way through. That's the thing people are most nervous about, and we don't touch those records without telling you first.

The short version

A small business website takes as long as the slowest decision. Remove the decisions and it takes a week.