Timeline quotes for websites range from “live by Friday” to “about a quarter.” Neither is a lie — they’re describing different amounts of actual work. Here are the honest numbers, and what they buy.
The real timelines, by project
A DIY builder site: a weekend to two. Genuinely. If you fit the DIY cases, expect 10–40 hours of your own time spread over however many evenings you can stand.
A template site from a volume shop: 1–3 weeks. Fast because it’s a skeleton with your logo swapped in. The speed is real; so is the sameness.
A professionally architected local-business site: 4–8 weeks. This is the honest industry standard for real custom work — and the time isn’t design. It’s the work that ranks: researching what your customers search, writing genuinely distinct pages for each service and town, structured data, speed work, and the launch tasks (redirects, indexing, analytics) that protect and start your Google presence.
Large sites — 50+ pages, content engines: 6–12 weeks. Volume of real writing, mostly. Our flagship build was 71 pages; nobody writes that well in a fortnight.
Where the time actually goes (it’s not Photoshop)
On a professional build, design is maybe a fifth of the clock. The bulk is content and architecture — the pages-for-every-service-and-town structure that determines whether the site ever ranks — plus the technical layer nobody sees. A four-day website skips exactly these, which is why it’s four days, and why it’ll be invisible in month six.
The delay that’s usually you (said with love)
Ask any web builder the real number-one schedule killer: waiting on the client — photos, logo files, service details, licence numbers, review approvals. A 6-week build becomes 14 because week 3’s questions sat in an inbox. If you want your project fast, the single best thing you can do is assemble everything before kickoff: photos, licensing info, service list with real prices, and one decision-maker who answers within a day or two. Builders should tell you this upfront; now one has.
And after launch: the timeline nobody quotes
Launch day is when the site exists, not when it performs. Google takes days to weeks to index a new site and months to rank it competitively — we publish our own site’s week-one numbers (162 impressions, zero clicks) precisely to show what a normal start looks like. Anyone promising launch-week rankings is quoting a timeline for a thing that doesn’t exist. The honest schedule: weeks to build, months to climb, years to compound — and worth every stage if a customer is worth real money to you.
Ready to put this to work?
New site or fixing the one you have — start the conversation. If you already have a website, I’ll include a free, plain-English audit with my reply: rankings, local search, and whether AI can find you.
Start your project →Already have a site? Ask for the free plain-English audit — or just email jamie@foundwork.ca.