How long does it take to build a website for your business?

“How long will it take?” is one of the first questions any small business owner asks about getting a website — and the honest answer is “anywhere from half an hour to six months, depending entirely on how you do it.” That’s a uselessly wide range, so let’s break it down by route, because the route is what decides the timeline far more than the size of your business.

The four ways to get a website, and how long each really takes

A web design agency: 4–12 weeks

Hire a traditional agency or freelance designer and you’re signing up for a project, not a purchase. There’s a discovery call, a proposal, mockups, rounds of feedback, content gathering, build, revisions, testing, then launch. Each step waits on the one before, and most of the waiting is on you — sending photos, approving designs, writing copy you keep meaning to get to.

A simple small-business site this way realistically takes four to eight weeks; anything with custom features, eight to twelve. The result can be excellent. But you’ll pay £1,500–£5,000 and the calendar time is measured in months, not days. For a lot of trades that delay alone is the dealbreaker — we wrote about the £500-plus mistake this often turns into.

DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress): a weekend to several weeks

The big DIY platforms promise you can do it yourself, and you can — but “you can” and “you will, quickly” are different things. You’re handed a blank canvas and hundreds of options: templates, fonts, colours, layouts, plugins. For someone who designs for a living that’s freedom. For a roofer who’d rather be on a roof, it’s a time sink.

Realistically, getting a DIY site you’re not embarrassed by takes a full weekend at the very least, and far more commonly drags across several evenings over a few weeks as you fiddle, get stuck, and put it off. Plenty of people start and never finish. We compared the main options in Wix vs Squarespace vs webfascia if you’re weighing them up.

A done-for-you service like webfascia: about 30 minutes

The newest route flips the model. Instead of a blank canvas or a months-long project, you answer a few questions about your business — what you do, where you work, your trade — and the site is generated for you, professionally laid out, ready to tweak. No design decisions, no template paralysis, no waiting on a designer’s diary.

Start to finish, that’s about half an hour to a site that’s live and findable. You can refine it afterwards at your own pace, but you’re never staring at a blank screen. This is the route that makes the old “how long will it take?” question almost obsolete.

You can throw up a free one-page builder or lean on a Facebook page in minutes. It’s genuinely fast — but it’s also limited, doesn’t show up properly in Google searches, and isn’t something you own. We’ve covered why a Facebook page usually isn’t enough on its own.

What actually drives the timeline (it’s not the size of your business)

People assume a bigger or more complex business needs a longer build. Usually it doesn’t. The real time drivers are:

How many decisions you have to make. Every design choice handed to you is a delay. The fastest routes make those decisions for you using sensible defaults.
How much you have to write from scratch. Staring at an empty “About us” box stalls more website projects than anything else. Services that draft your copy for you remove the single biggest bottleneck.
Whether anyone else is in the loop. The moment a designer is waiting on your feedback — or you’re waiting on theirs — days turn into weeks. Self-serve routes have no such gaps.
Gathering your photos and details. This is the one bit that’s on you whichever route you pick. Having your logo, a handful of job photos, your service list and your contact details ready will speed up any build.

Notice that none of these scale with how big your business is. A sole-trader plumber and a ten-van firm both get live in roughly the same time on the same route.

How to get live faster, whichever route you choose

A few things shave time off any website project:

Gather your assets first. Logo, 5–10 job photos, your list of services, your service area, and your phone number and email in one folder before you start.
Write your services as a plain list. You don’t need polished prose to begin — bullet points of what you do are enough, and they double as the service-and-area copy Google needs to rank you.
Don’t chase perfect. A good site that’s live today beats a perfect one that’s still “nearly ready” in three weeks. You can always refine later; you can’t get back the customers who searched while you were tweaking.
Pick the route that matches your time, not your ambition. If evenings are precious, a done-for-you service will get you a better result faster than wrestling a DIY builder you’ll abandon half-finished.

So what’s the real answer?

If you’ve weeks to spare and a budget for an agency, four to twelve weeks. If you’re doing it yourself on a DIY platform, a weekend if you’re disciplined and several weeks if you’re not. And if you use a done-for-you service, about half an hour to live.

For most small businesses and tradespeople — short on time, not short on jobs to be doing — the half-hour route is the one that actually gets finished. The best website is the one that’s live and bringing in work, not the one that’s perfect but still in your head.

The webfascia bit

webfascia is the 30-minute route. Answer a few questions about your business and you get a fast, mobile-first, professionally laid-out site that’s live and findable — for tradespeople and small businesses alike. It’s £29.99 a month, the first 30 days are free, and there’s no card needed to start.

Want to see what your business’s site would look like before committing a penny? The free 60-second analyser is the quickest way to see where you stand right now.