How long does a website take?

The question that comes straight after price. Honestly: a simple site can be done in a couple of weeks, while a web shop or a booking system takes longer. The deadline is set less by the technology than by the scope, the content and the speed of decisions. Here is what that looks like in practice, and what you can do to make the project move faster.

Build time is not a fixed number off a price list. It is closer to a range that narrows the moment two things become clear: what exactly the site has to do, and how quickly you will take part in the process. The same size of project can wrap up in three weeks or stretch to two months, and the difference is rarely in the code. So instead of a single number we look at the phases, the factors that stretch them, and the concrete moves that shorten the deadline from your side.

The phases of a project

Almost every project goes through the same steps, whether we are building a simple site or a web shop. All that changes is how long each step lasts. You can see our order on the process section, and here is how the phases look in terms of time.

Two more short phases follow development, and they are easy to forget. The first is review and refinement: we walk through the site together, fix the small things and check the copy. The second is launch and setup, where we move the site onto your domain, put analytics and basic SEO in place, and check that everything works on a phone and on a computer. Those two phases usually take a few days, but they have to be counted in when you are working towards a specific date.

Realistic timelines by type of site

The best way to judge your own project is to sort it into one of these groups. The ranges come from experience rather than from a rulebook, and they shift with the number of pages and features. A closer breakdown of scope itself is on the web development page.

A real example: a guesthouse on the coast that wants a gallery, a reservation enquiry and the site in Croatian and English realistically sits in the middle of the second range. The same guesthouse with nothing but a good presentation and a contact page drops easily into the first. It is the features, not the design, that move the deadline. With a web shop the same holds for the price, which we broke down in how much a web shop costs.

What speeds the work up and what slows it down

When a project runs late, the cause is almost always somewhere on the same list. The good news is that most of it sits under your control.

You will notice that four of the five rows are about people, not about technology. Late content is the most common reason a project stalls: the design looks finished, but the site is waiting on the text about the services or the photos of the space. Decision making is second. When feedback arrives from several people who do not agree with each other, every round of revisions takes twice as long.

The fastest projects are the ones where the content is ready, the scope is clear and the decisions are quick. Technology rarely slows things down. Communication does.

How to make your project go faster

You do not need to know anything about building websites to shorten the deadline. A few things prepared before we start are enough.

• Get the text and photos ready in advance, or tell us at the start that we should produce them, so nothing is waiting on materials later.
• Appoint one person for decisions and feedback. The team can put forward suggestions, but sign-off should run through a single person.
• Start with a clear, realistic scope. Anything not essential for the first launch belongs in the phase after it, as a growth plan.
• Reply in one round. Gather all your notes on a draft and send them together, instead of drip feeding them over several days.

It sounds simple because it is. Projects that respect these four rules regularly land in the lower part of their range. With sole traders we put the emphasis on reaching a working site fast, without unnecessary steps in between. And if you are still weighing up whether you need a site at all, there is does my small business need a website.

A deadline tied to a date: season, opening, campaign

Plenty of projects carry a hard deadline: the start of the tourist season, the opening of a venue, or a campaign with a date on it. For tours and transfers that usually means the booking system has to be finished before June, not in June. In those cases we do not start from the question of how long it takes, we start from the target date and plan backwards. From the launch date we work out when development has to be done, when the design has to be done, and when we need your materials. That way you see straight away whether the deadline is doable at full scope, or whether we publish a narrower first version and add the extras after launch. That is often the smartest move: the site is online on time, and it keeps growing without the pressure.