How long does a joiner's website take to build? A phase-by-phase build log
A joiner I spoke to earlier this year had been waiting eleven weeks. He had paid half up front in May, sent over a folder of photographs, and since then had received one holding page with his logo on it and increasingly vague replies. He wanted to know whether eleven weeks was normal for a website, or whether he had been had.
It is a fair question and nobody in the trade answers it honestly, because the honest answer is unflattering to a lot of people who build websites. Eleven weeks is not normal. It is also not unusual, which is a different thing.
So this is the calendar rather than the sales pitch: what each phase of a seven page joinery site actually takes, which of those phases is genuinely slow, and which one is the reason most British trade websites drift. There is one clear answer to that last part, and it is not the building.
About eight working days from photographs to live, for a seven page joinery site built by somebody who does this full time. Doing it yourself on Wix or Squarespace takes three to eight weeks of evenings. A UK freelancer usually quotes four to twelve. The build is rarely the slow part in any of them: waiting on photographs is.
Where the eight days actually go
On a seven page joinery site the largest single block of elapsed time is not design or code, it is the gap between agreeing to start and receiving usable photographs of finished work.
Sitework's own phase breakdown for a seven page carpentry and joinery site. Elapsed working days, not billable hours, which is the number that answers the question people are actually asking.
Read the top two bars together and the whole thing makes sense. The part everybody imagines is the website, the actual building of it, is a quarter of the calendar. The part nobody plans for, getting pictures of your own work off your phone and into a folder, is nearly half.
That is why two joiners who order the same site in the same week can go live a month apart. It is not that one build was harder. One of them sent forty photographs on the Monday and the other sent four, then went quiet for a fortnight because he was on a staircase in Guildford.
The clock does not start when you pay, it starts when the photographs land
Seven things start the build, and six of them take a joiner under twenty minutes to gather, which is why an eight day build so often becomes a six week one.
Every hour of a website build after the first depends on content that only you have. Nobody can write the fitted wardrobes page without knowing whether you make them in a workshop or on site, and nobody can build a gallery out of nothing. Send these seven in one go and the eight days hold.
Why photographs are the bottleneck and not the copy
Copy can be drafted from a twenty minute phone call and corrected later. Photographs cannot be invented, and stock images of somebody else's kitchen are worse than none. A joinery site sells on the evidence that you make things well: the scribe against a wall that was never straight, the shadow gap that runs true, the end grain on a worktop join. There is no substitute for that in a stock library, which is why the gallery is the one part of the build that genuinely waits on you. I set out exactly what to hand over, and in what format, in what to send your web designer.
Four routes, four very different calendars
The gap between the quickest and slowest route to a live joinery website is not two weeks, it is three months, and the cost ordering does not match the speed ordering.
| Route | Typical elapsed | Your evenings | Year one cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself Wix or Squarespace | 3 to 8 weeks | 12 to 20 | £120 to £250 |
| Local freelancer | 4 to 12 weeks | 3 to 5 | £800 to £2,500 |
| Agency | 8 to 16 weeks | 4 to 8 | £3,000 upwards |
| Done-for-you plan What I do | About a week | 1 | £650, no build fee |
The DIY row is the one worth staring at, because it looks like the cheap option and the evenings column is why it often is not. Twelve to twenty evenings is three to five weeks of your spare time. At a £200 day rate that is real money you have chosen not to see, and it buys a site you then maintain forever. I priced the platforms themselves properly, including what happens when the introductory rate expires, in Wix against Squarespace for a small carpentry business.
The freelancer row is the widest for a reason. Four weeks is a good one with a clear gap in the diary. Twelve weeks is a good one who took your job on while finishing three others, which is the eleven week story at the top of this page and the single most common complaint I hear from UK trades. It is worth reading what should be in a web design contract before you pay anybody a deposit, because a written completion date is the cheapest protection there is.
The three delays that are nobody's fault
Three parts of a UK website build run on somebody else's clock entirely: domain access, Google Business Profile verification, and Google finding the site once it is live.
Domain access
A .co.uk registers in minutes, and it is cheap at wholesale: Nominet, the
UK registry, charges its registrars £3.90 a year, and lets domains be registered for
anything from one to ten years. The delay is never buying a new one. It is recovering an
old one, when the domain was registered years ago by a designer who has since gone
quiet, and nobody can remember which registrar holds it. That can take a fortnight of
emails on its own, so it is the first thing to check and not the last.
Google Business Profile verification
If you have never claimed your profile, or you are claiming one somebody else set up, you go through Google's verification. Where that is done by video, Google states the review "can take up to five working days". That runs in parallel with the build, which is exactly why it should be started on day one rather than the day before launch.
Google finding the page
Google's own documentation is blunt about this: after you ask for a page to be recrawled, "crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks". That is before any question of where you rank. Anyone promising a joinery site on page one within a fortnight is describing something Google does not offer.
Live is not the same as found
Going live is day eight, being indexed is usually inside a fortnight, and steady enquiries land somewhere between month two and month six depending on how competitive your towns are.
This is the expectation that most needs setting, because it is where trade websites get written off unfairly. A joiner in a small town in Wales with three competitors may see enquiries inside a month. The same site in a Surrey commuter belt with forty joiners takes longer, and the difference is the competition, not the build.
What shortens it is unglamorous and mostly happens in that half-day marked local SEO on the chart: a page for each thing you actually sell, your towns in writing on the page rather than only in the footer, the Business Profile matching the site exactly, and schema so search engines and AI assistants can read what you do without guessing. Those are the same fundamentals I go through for kitchen fitters, where the money jobs are fewer and the pages have to work harder as a result.
What the week actually costs
A done-for-you joinery site is £50 every four weeks with no build fee, which is thirteen payments of £50 across a year, and nothing at all to pay before you have seen it.
The reason the calendar above is eight days rather than eight weeks is that it is the only thing I do. There is no queue of other jobs it sits behind, and there is no version where the deposit is spent and the work is not. You see a free mockup of your own business first, built from your photographs and your towns, before any money changes hands.
After that it is £50 every four weeks and that is the whole cost: the site, hosting, the domain, the certificate, backups and unlimited small text and photo edits, so adding last week's staircase is a text message rather than an evening. Three months minimum, then rolling. After twelve months the website is yours to keep, files and domain transferred, no exit fee. If you want the detail of what actually happens between order and launch, I wrote it up step by step in what happens when you order a trade website, and the full spec for a joinery build sits on the carpentry and joinery page.
Bottom line: eight working days is achievable and three months is common, and the thing that decides which one you get is not the builder's skill or the price you paid. It is whether the photographs are sitting in a folder on day one.