“How long does it take?” is usually answered with a number that turns out to be wrong — not because anyone lied, but because the number described the build, and the build isn’t the slow part.
The honest version: the building takes roughly a week. Getting to the point where building can start is what varies, and that part is mostly determined by you.
That’s not a complaint. It’s useful, because it’s the part you can control.
What actually happens, in order
Scoping. A conversation about the business, who the site is for, and what it needs to do. This settles what’s being built and what it costs, before anyone starts. Usually a day or two, mostly waiting on replies.
Gathering. Content, photos, business details, service descriptions, pricing. This is the stage that varies from an afternoon to several months, and it’s almost entirely on your side.
Building. Design and construction. About a week for a typical small business site once everything’s in hand.
Review. You look at it on a real device, note what’s wrong, changes get made. A few days including your turnaround time.
Launch. Domain pointed at the finished site, everything checked live. Same day, with one caveat below.
What you’ll need to supply
Have these ready and the project moves at the speed of the build. Gather them as you go and the timeline stretches.
- Business details — legal name, service area, phone, email, hours if relevant
- Services — what you offer, described the way you’d describe it to a customer
- Pricing — if you’re publishing it, the actual numbers
- Photos — of your work, your team, your premises
- Anything existing — logo files, current site content, brochures worth reusing
- Domain access — or the willingness to register one, in your own name
The one most people underestimate: a clear sense of what the site is supposed to do. Not the design — the job. Bring in estimate requests? Stop repetitive phone calls? Look credible enough to charge more? A business that knows this moves fast, because most decisions answer themselves against it. A business still deciding pays for the deciding, in time and usually in money.
Photos are the bottleneck
More projects stall on photos than on anything else. It’s worth being specific about why.
Most business owners have photos, but they’re on a phone, taken quickly, in bad light, cropped for social media. They’re not unusable — but they need cropping, resizing, and colour correction to sit properly in a layout, and some simply can’t be rescued.
If you’re taking new ones, a few things make a disproportionate difference:
- Shoot wide and landscape. Website layouts crop horizontally. A tightly-framed vertical phone photo can’t become a wide hero image, but a wide shot can always be cropped down.
- Use daylight. Near a window, or outdoors on an overcast day. Overhead indoor lighting is the most common reason a photo of good work looks bad.
- Get the whole thing in frame. Detail shots are useful as secondary images, but a finished room, a finished job, or a full storefront is what people want to see first.
- Before and after, from the same spot. For any trade or renovation work, this is the single most persuasive thing you can supply, and it costs nothing but remembering to take the “before.”
- More than you think you need. Ten usable photos is a comfortable site. Three means the layout works around a shortage.
Stock photography is the fallback and it’s fine, but it never sells your work the way a photo of your actual work does.
The launch-day caveat
When the domain gets pointed at the new site, the change has to propagate across the internet’s DNS system. Usually this is quick — minutes to a couple of hours. Occasionally it takes up to a day, and during that window some people see the new site and some see the old one.
Nothing is broken when this happens. It’s worth knowing in advance so it isn’t alarming, and it’s worth not scheduling an announcement for the same hour as the switch.
What happens after
Defects — anything in the agreed scope not working correctly — should be fixed by whoever built it, free, for a defined window. Ask what that window is before you hire.
Changes — new pages, new content, design adjustments — are new work and get quoted as such. That’s reasonable at any point; what matters is that it’s clear which category something falls into.
Maintenance depends entirely on what the site is built on. A platform with a database, CMS, and plugins genuinely requires ongoing updates. A static site doesn’t, which is why some builders require a maintenance plan and others don’t. See flat fee, hourly, or retainer for how that shapes pricing.
What actually slows projects down
In rough order of frequency:
- Waiting on content and photos. By a wide margin.
- Unclear decision-making. Especially when more than one person has opinions and nobody has final say. Decide who signs off before you start.
- Scope discovered late. “Can it also do bookings?” in week two is a different project than it was in week one. Not unreasonable — just decide early where you can.
- Slow review cycles. The build finishes in days and then waits two weeks for feedback. Block out time for review when the project starts.
Notice that none of these are the builder working slowly. That happens too, but it’s rarely the main cause.
Where TruePoint sits
About a week from the point everything needed is in hand — content, photos, business details, and the deposit. The clock starts when the project is genuinely ready to build rather than at first contact, because otherwise the timeline is measuring your gathering, not our building.
We’ll tell you exactly what’s needed up front, in a list, so nothing surfaces halfway through.
Defects in the agreed scope are fixed free for 30 days after launch. Changes after that are quoted per job, with no retainer required. There’s no maintenance plan because these are static sites with nothing to maintain.
If you want to know what a project like yours costs before getting into logistics, what a small business website actually costs covers the ranges. If you’re ready to start, the project form takes a few minutes and costs nothing.