A website is a core tool for any business, regardless of company size. We’re often asked how long a website takes to make. The short answer is “it depends”! This blog is designed to outline how long a website takes to make and look at factors that can shorten or lengthen the process.
As different companies can have differing budgets, we’ll look at a range of different types of websites and look into how long they can take to make. We’re basing this on a professional doing the work and everything is ready to go at the start of the build process (content, images and other information that can slow up a website project), and there are no delays in the design process with approvals.
Option 1, buy a one-page WordPress template – less than one day to build
You could go onto ThemeForest or Envato Market, buy a one-page theme that is from your business sector, and then populate the content and swap in your logo. With minimal customisation, it would be possible to create a website in less than one day.
This would be the quickest way to build a site and also the lowest budget. It’s also likely to be the lowest impact for your business as loads of other businesses will have this theme in your sector. You could customise the theme by changing colours and images in the code, this would add some time and allow it to look a bit more like your business.
Option 2, buy a theme for a larger WordPress website template – around one week to build
This would be a quick way to get a larger website up and running for your business. You could purchase a theme from one of the websites outlined earlier and then customise this with your content and logo. As this is a larger site theme, you probably would want to invest in the time to have this customised with your colours and fonts, and potentially adjust the styling more with HTML and CSS.
Option 3, use a page builder and create the bespoke pages – around 3-4 weeks
There are a lot of page builders for WordPress out there. Some of the more widely used ones would be Elementor and Divi. Designing a site like this would give you greater freedom to make changes at a later date as the page builders are very intuitive to use once your developer will have finished their work. Typically, you would go through the web design process of creating the site as a prototype and then take your design into the builder using HTML and CSS. At Trident we build a lot of sites this way and they work well for SME businesses who want to manage some of the content themselves at a later date.
Option 4, create a fully bespoke WordPress site, around 6-8 weeks for design and build
This is the best way to create a website in WordPress. Simply because it’s fully bespoke code and runs quicker than page builders, which Google loves for SEO. You would follow a similar process in creating a prototype for all pages like in the previous option, but you would then take the website and create all of the pages in HTML and CSS using flexible content blocks in WordPress. This means content can be changed later, but also retains the speed of the site as its bespoke code. If you were to choose this method, due to the amount of time to create the website, it would be the highest budget option for your business.
Other factors that would affect how long a website takes to make
In terms of other things that could add time to the process of the website design project, there are a number of factors. Most of these would be:
- E-commerce. Adding products to sell in your shop would be an extra amount of time to finish the project.
- Writing content or getting images. If the images and text were not available at the start of the project, this would slow things down.
- Complex integrations – you might need to get the website to talk to other software, which would require additional development time to deliver.
- Extra pages. The examples above are for a typical business website. If you had hundreds of pages that all needed building that would add time to the delivery.
If you’re interested in getting a new website built, we’re experts in WordPress. We don’t typically offer straight themes to businesses as outlined in options 1 and 2, but if you’re interested in a more bespoke project tailored to your business, we can help.
Contact us to find out more about how we can help you develop your company website.
