How Long Should a Website Actually Take to Build? (And Why Yours Is Taking Forever)
“I’ve got someone in the office who’s pretty good with computers. They reckon they can knock up a website in a few hours.”
Famous last words.
Look, I get it. You need a website. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars. And Sarah from accounts did mention she built a website for her brother’s cafe three years ago using WordPress.
How hard can it be, right?
Let me walk you through what actually happens when you hand this project to a staff member. Because I’ve seen this movie before, and it never ends in a couple of hours.
Week One: The Optimism Phase
Day 1 – Monday Morning (2 hours)
Sarah is pumped. She’s been given a proper project. Something creative. A break from the usual admin grind.
She sits down with you for a coffee. You talk about what you want. She takes notes. “This should be pretty straightforward,” she says. “I’ll have something to show you by Wednesday.”
You go back to running your business. She goes back to her desk and opens Google. “Best website builders 2024.”
Day 2 – Tuesday (3 hours)
Sarah has spent the morning comparing Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and something called Webflow that looked cool on YouTube.
She’s made a decision. WordPress. She used it before. She remembers it being pretty easy.
She signs up for hosting. Gets confused about domains and DNS settings. Calls the hosting company. Waits on hold for 25 minutes. Finally gets it sorted.
WordPress is installed. She’s looking at a blank site. Time to find a theme.
Day 3 – Wednesday (4 hours)
There are 10,000 WordPress themes. Sarah has looked at 47 of them.
She finally picks one. It looks great in the demo. She installs it.
It looks nothing like the demo. Where are all the nice images? Why does the menu look broken? What’s a widget?
She watches three YouTube tutorials about the theme. She’s making progress. Kind of.
You walk past her desk at 4pm. “How’s it going?”
“Yeah good, just figuring out a few things. Should have something by end of week.”
Week Two: The Reality Check
Day 5 – Friday (5 hours)
Sarah has been working on the homepage for two days. Every time she changes something, something else breaks.
The mobile version looks terrible. The images are too big. The text is overlapping. There’s a weird gap she can’t figure out how to remove.
She’s Googling “how to remove padding in WordPress” for the fourth time today.
She’s also fielding phone calls, doing her actual job, and trying to remember what CSS stands for.
You pop your head in. “Can I see it?”
She shows you. It’s not what you pictured. “Can we change the colours? And move that section up? And add another page about our services?”
“Yeah no worries,” she says. She writes it down. She’s not sure how to do any of that yet.
Week 2 – Monday to Wednesday (12 hours)
Sarah is now spending about half her day on the website. Her actual work is piling up.
She’s learned that changing colours requires editing something called CSS. Or maybe the theme customizer. Or possibly both. It depends on which YouTube tutorial you watch.
She’s rewritten the homepage three times because you keep changing your mind about what message you want to lead with. That’s fine. You’re allowed to change your mind. But each change takes her two hours to implement.
The contact form doesn’t work. She’s installed a plugin. Now there are two contact forms and she can’t delete the first one.
Week 2 – Thursday (6 hours)
Crisis. A customer needs something urgently. Sarah has to drop the website and do her actual job.
The website sits untouched for a day and a half.
Week Three to Four: The Grind
Week 3 (20 hours)
Sarah is now deep in the weeds. She’s watched so many tutorials she’s dreaming in WordPress.
The site is taking shape. It’s got pages. It’s got content. Some of the images even look alright on mobile now.
But there are problems she doesn’t even know exist yet.
The site loads slowly. She doesn’t know about image compression or caching or any of that.
There’s no proper heading structure. She’s using whatever looks good, not what works for SEO.
The contact page has your phone number as plain text. She doesn’t know that makes it hard for mobile users to click and call.
There are no call-to-action buttons anywhere strategic. The site is just information. Nothing guides people to actually contact you.
Week 4 (15 hours)
You’ve now reviewed the site four times. Each time you want changes. Each time Sarah nods and adds it to her list.
She’s frustrated. You’re frustrated. This was supposed to take a couple of hours.
Her actual job is suffering. Things are slipping through the cracks. She’s stressed.
Week Five: Going Live (Maybe)
Week 5 – Monday to Wednesday (8 hours)
Final push. Sarah is determined to get this live. She’s been working on it for a month.
She hits publish. The site is live. It exists. It’s not perfect, but it’s done.
You’re relieved. She’s relieved. Everyone’s ready to move on.
Three Months Later: The Phone’s Not Ringing
The website has been live for three months.
You’ve had maybe two enquiries from it. Total.
You mention this to Sarah. She doesn’t know why. It looks fine to her. Maybe you need to do some marketing?
Here’s what she didn’t know to do:
She didn’t set up proper page titles and meta descriptions. Google doesn’t really understand what each page is about.
She didn’t add schema markup. Your business doesn’t show up properly in local search with your phone number and hours.
She didn’t optimize the site for conversions. There’s no strategic placement of contact forms, no compelling calls to action, no trust signals.
She didn’t set up Google Analytics or tracking. You have no idea where those two enquiries even came from.
She didn’t make it easy for people to contact you. The phone number isn’t click-to-call on mobile. The contact form asks for too much information. There’s no prominent “Get a Quote” button.
The site exists. But it’s not working. It’s not bringing in jobs.
The Rebuild Conversation
Six months in, you’re sitting down with a web developer. A proper one.
“Can you fix our website? It’s just not getting us any leads.”
They look at it. They’re diplomatic. “We could try to fix it, but honestly, you’d be better off starting fresh. The foundation isn’t right.”
More money. More time. And Sarah’s four weeks of work gets thrown in the bin.
The Actual Timeline Breakdown
Let’s be honest about how long this really takes for a staff member who isn’t a web developer:
Planning and structure: 6-8 hours Working out what pages you need, what goes where, how it should flow. This isn’t just sitting down and making decisions. It’s research, revisions, and rethinking.
Learning the platform: 10-15 hours Even if they’ve used WordPress before, every theme is different. Every page builder has quirks. They’re essentially relearning as they go.
Design and layout: 15-20 hours Making it look decent across desktop, tablet, and mobile. Dealing with broken layouts. Fixing spacing issues. Matching your brand colours. Finding or creating images that work.
Content creation: 8-12 hours Writing copy, sourcing images, editing everything to fit. This takes longer than anyone expects.
Problem-solving and fixes: 10-15 hours The contact form that won’t work. The menu that breaks on mobile. The weird gap that appeared from nowhere. The plugin conflicts. The unexpected issues that eat up entire afternoons.
Revisions based on feedback: 8-12 hours Every time you want something changed, it’s not a five-minute fix. It’s testing, checking it didn’t break something else, and adjusting until it’s right.
Total: 57 to 82 hours
That’s two full work weeks at minimum. More likely it’s three to four weeks because they’re also doing their actual job.
At even a modest hourly rate of what you’re paying them, you’re looking at thousands of dollars in labour costs. Plus the opportunity cost of their real work not getting done.
What You Actually Need
You don’t need a staff member who’s “pretty good with computers” spending six weeks building a website.
You need someone who knows:
How to structure a site so Google understands it.
How to optimize every page for conversions, not just aesthetics.
How to make your phone number impossible to miss on mobile.
Where to put calls to action so people actually use them.
How to track what’s working so you can improve it.
How to build it fast because they’ve done it 100 times before.
A professional web developer will have your site done properly in a week or two. Not because they work harder, but because they’re not figuring it out as they go.
And when it goes live, your phone will actually ring.
The Bottom Line
Your staff member means well. They genuinely think they can help. And sure, they might eventually produce something that technically qualifies as a website.
But that “couple of hours” will turn into weeks. Their productivity in their actual role will tank. And at the end of it, you’ll have a site that exists but doesn’t perform.
Then you’ll pay someone else to rebuild it properly anyway.
You can either pay for it once now, or pay for it twice later.
Your call.