How long does it take to build a business website?
About a day for a few pages that say what you do, and about a week for something that takes payments or bookings. Neither of those is the number that decides your launch date. Waiting on your photos, your prices and your bank is what makes a two week project take two months, and that part is in your hands.
Last checked 14 August 2026. Prices on this page are ours and current.
The two honest timelines
A shop window is a day. A few pages, your services, opening hours, a map, a button that opens WhatsApp. There is nothing in it that needs discovery or architecture, and anyone telling you it takes six weeks is either very busy or padding.
Something people use is about a week. Payments or bookings, a catalogue or a calendar, an admin panel you log into, accounts for your customers. A week of actual work, a bit more if you want all of it at once.
Both assume the thing nobody puts in a proposal: that we have what we need from you.
What actually makes it late
Content. Almost always content. Not the writing, which we can do, but the specifics only you have. The real prices. Which services you have quietly stopped offering. Photographs of your own place that are not five years old.
Decisions with more than one owner. A build waiting on three people to agree what the homepage says is not blocked on code.
Payments, if you want them. Getting a business approved to take cards involves a bank and paperwork, and that clock is not ours. Start it early and in parallel, not after the site is finished.
And approvals you did not know about. A domain in somebody else's name from four years ago, a WhatsApp template that comes back rejected for wording, a hosting account nobody has the password to.
How to make it fast
Put your prices in a document before we start, even a rough one. Pick one person who decides. Send us photographs of the real place rather than stock. And if you want payments, start the bank conversation the day you commission the site.
Do those four and a week is a week. Skip them and no builder on earth can hold the date.
A word on going live early
A site that is live and slightly incomplete beats a perfect one sitting in review. Google needs time to find you, so the sooner a real page exists the sooner that clock starts.
We would rather launch with four pages you are happy with and add the fifth next week than hold everything for a photograph you keep meaning to take.
Do not take our word for it.
A site assembling itself, and both prices in full with nothing hidden underneath.
- Can you do it faster than a day?
- Sometimes, if you have your text and photographs ready and the scope is genuinely a few pages. Ask rather than assume.
- What do you need from me to start?
- Your prices or services, photographs, your opening hours and address, and one person who can make decisions. That covers most of it.
- Who writes the words?
- We can, and it is better when you send us the awkward specifics first. The details only you know are what make a page not read like every other page in your industry.
- What if we want changes after launch?
- Small things are usually quick and we will tell you when something is not. The site is yours, so you are never stuck waiting on us to be free.
Tell us what you are trying to work out and we will answer it straight, including when the answer is that you do not need us.
Or email hello@ahlelak.com