It’s a reasonable question. You need a website, you’ve got a business to run, and you want to know what you’re signing up for.
The honest answer depends entirely on how you’re doing it.
The DIY route: longer than you think
Let’s say you decide to build it yourself using a platform like Wix or Squarespace. The marketing suggests you could have something up in an afternoon. Here’s how it actually tends to go.
Week one: you sign up, browse templates, pick one, start customising. It takes longer than expected. You get the basics in place but run out of time.
Week two: you come back to it, realise the template doesn’t quite work for what you need, try adjusting things. Some of it is fiddly. You spend an evening on something that should have taken ten minutes.
Week three: you haven’t touched it. Other things came up.
Week four: you open it again, feel overwhelmed by how much there is still to do, tinker with fonts and colours to feel productive.
Week five onwards: the site sits unfinished. You know you need to write content but don’t know where to start. Every time you think about it, you feel a small pang of guilt.
This isn’t a criticism – it’s just reality. I’ve spoken to plenty of business owners who’ve had half-finished websites sitting in draft for months. Building a website while running a business is genuinely hard to fit in.
When DIY works, you might get something live in a few weeks of evening and weekend work. When it doesn’t, it can drag on indefinitely.
The agency route: thorough but slow
At the other end of the spectrum, you could hire a traditional web agency. They’ll do everything properly – discovery meetings, wireframes, design concepts, development, testing, revisions.
The quality can be excellent. But the timeline is typically measured in months, and the process can feel endless. There are meetings, feedback rounds, and a lot of back-and-forth.
For larger businesses with complex requirements, this makes sense. For a small business that just needs to get online professionally, it’s often overkill.
The WordPressMatic route: one week
This is the gap I set out to fill.
For a Starter site – landing page, contact page, small blog – my turnaround is one week from receiving your brief. That’s not a target, it’s the standard.
How? Because I’ve built the process specifically for speed without cutting corners. I use professional tools behind the scenes that would take you months to learn. I write content efficiently because I’ve done it hundreds of times. I’ve got templates for the legal bits, hosting already configured, workflows optimised.
It’s the same principle as any skilled trade. A joiner builds a cabinet faster than you could because they’ve got the right tools, the right experience, and they’ve done it before. The speed comes from expertise, not from rushing.
For Growth sites – larger, more complex builds – the timeline depends on scope, but even these are typically measured in weeks rather than months.
What affects the timeline
If you’re comparing options, here are the main factors that determine how long a website takes.
How clear is the brief? The more you know about what you need, the faster it goes. If you’re still figuring out your services and messaging, that needs to happen first.
Who’s writing the content? Content is usually the bottleneck. If you’re writing it yourself, that’s where delays creep in. If someone else handles it (like I do), things move much faster.
How much back-and-forth is there? Some processes involve endless revision rounds. Others – like mine – show you a preview, take feedback, and finalise. Simpler means quicker.
How complex is the site? A five-page site for a local service business is a different job from a fifty-page site with custom functionality. Scope affects timeline.
The real question
It’s worth asking yourself: how long has “sort out website” been on your to-do list already?
If it’s been months – or longer – the DIY route probably isn’t working for you, and that’s fine. Sometimes the fastest way to get something done is to hand it to someone who’ll actually do it.