Short answer: one to two weeks for a single-page site, a few weeks for a full multi-page one.
Longer answer: the build is almost never the slow part, and the thing that decides your timeline is something you control rather than something I do.
The rough shape of it
A one-page site: one to two weeks. It covers one service and one area with one clear call to action, which is enough to be findable and get the phone ringing.
A full multi-page site: a few weeks. A page per service, a portfolio, a service-area page, the email and Google listing sorted alongside it. This is what most trade businesses want.
A store or a real booking system: longer, and it depends. Products, payments and integrations all add moving parts, and each one is somewhere the timeline can slip.
One recent build, a compact site for a Pilates studio, went live in about a week from start to finish. That was possible because the brief was tight (simple, well priced, quick to deploy) and the client knew exactly what she wanted the site to say.
What holds it up
The code is never the hold-up. It is always one of these three.
Photographs
This is the number one cause of a stalled build, particularly for trades. The site is finished, and it is waiting on six photos of your own work that you have been meaning to take for a fortnight.
Take them before you start. Phone photos in good light are fine. What is not fine is starting the build with nothing and hoping.
Words about your own business
Most people find this harder than they expect. You know your trade completely and have never had to explain it to a stranger in writing.
I will draft it from a phone call if that is easier, and for most clients that is what happens. But that only works if the phone call gets booked, which brings us to the third thing.
Getting feedback back from someone who is on the tools all day
You are not sitting at a desk. A round of feedback that would take an office worker an hour takes you until the weekend, and that is completely reasonable. But three rounds of that is three weeks of calendar time on maybe four hours of actual work.
The fix is to batch it: look at the whole thing once, properly, with a coffee, and give me everything at once.
How to make it fast
If you want the shortest possible timeline, do these before you engage anyone:
- Take twenty photos of finished jobs. More than you think you need. Wide shots, not close-ups of joinery.
- Write down the suburbs and postcodes you cover. The actual list.
- List your services the way customers describe them. “Rotten deck boards”, not “structural timber repair”.
- Find your licence number and insurance details.
- Decide who is the one person giving feedback. If it goes to you and your partner and your mate who “knows about websites”, add two weeks.
Do that and a full site can move quickly. Skip it and the same site takes a month, mostly spent waiting.
What happens on my side
Four steps, and none of them is a surprise: a conversation about the business and a fair budget, then the structure and design, then the build, then launch and support. There is a fixed quote agreed before any of it starts and a 50% deposit to book the slot in the calendar.
One thing to flag: I take on a small number of projects at a time, so the real constraint is sometimes when I can start rather than how long the build takes once I have. If you have a date in mind, ask about it early.
Whether it will drag on
Usually when someone asks how long it takes, they want to know whether it will drag on and become another thing they have to chase.
What answers that is a fixed quote and a single point of contact who tells you what is holding it up. Ask me what your job would look like and you will get a straight answer on both the price and the timing.