How long should a website actually take to build?

It's almost never the build itself sitting idle. It's waiting — for photos, for final copy, for someone to approve the homepage design before the rest of the site can follow its lead, for a decision on which three services to actually feature. A build with content ready on day one and quick feedback throughout can move fast. The same build with a two-week silence after 'looks great, just need to check with my business partner' takes exactly as long as that silence lasts, plus the work.

Scope creep is the other one. 'While we're at it, could we also add a booking system / a blog / a members area' is a completely reasonable thing to want — it's just a different, bigger project than the one that was quoted, and pretending otherwise is how a two-week build quietly becomes an eight-week one with nobody quite sure why.

For a five-to-ten-page small-business site with content ready to go: production time of one to two weeks is realistic once you're working with people who do this regularly, not as one project among many unrelated ones. That's actual build time — design, development, review — not counting any delay on the content side, which is squarely the variable most within the client's control.

Bespoke, larger builds — custom booking systems, e-commerce, anything with real functionality behind it — reasonably take longer, and anyone promising two weeks for that kind of scope is either underscoping the work or planning to cut corners somewhere you won't see until later.

Have your content roughly ready before the build starts — even rough, unpolished copy and a folder of photos is enough. It's the single biggest lever on timeline, more than anything the person building the site controls. Everything else is process; that part's on both of us.