How long does a website take to build?
The honest answer: three to six weeks for a proper small-business website, start to launch. Anyone promising forty-eight hours is selling you a template with your logo on it; anyone quoting six months for five pages is billing you for their disorganisation. Here's where the time actually goes — and which phase matters most.
Week one: the research (the part most builders skip)
Before anything is designed, the questions that decide whether the site will ever earn its keep: what do your customers actually type into Google? Who wins those searches today? What would it take to beat them? We measure this properly — real search numbers, live results checked from your town — and put it in writing. You see the research documents and agree the plan before design begins. A day of research beats a month of redesigns.
Weeks two to four: design and build
With the plan agreed, the pages get designed and coded against it — each page aimed at a search it can win, written to answer what the searcher asked. Your job in this phase is photos, facts and feedback; good raw material is the single biggest thing a business owner can do to keep a build fast.
The week before launch: the checks
Every MyDiro build has to pass our published 100-point standard at 90 or better before it goes live — speed, mobile, the works. Then launch is a switch-flip, and if you're moving from an old site, the move happens with no downtime.
What makes builds drag (so you can avoid it)
- No plan. "Let's see some designs first" is how projects hit month four. Research first, then design, is faster and better.
- Content arriving late. The site can't launch without your words and photos. We help write ours — but the sooner the raw material lands, the sooner you launch.
- Unlimited revisions. Sounds generous, means drift. Agree the plan up front and revisions become tweaks, not rebuilds.
With the Managed Website you're never billed until launch day — so a slow build costs us, not you. That tends to keep everyone honest about timelines. Start with the free plan.