How long does a trade website take to go live?

The website you keep meaning to sort out takes about a week to build. That is the uncomfortable truth behind a job most trades put off for a year or more: done properly, by someone who builds them all the time, a one-page trade site goes from first message to live in roughly seven days. The same site built on a DIY platform in your evenings takes three weeks to three months, and an honest share of those builds never launch at all, stalling forever at "nearly done" while the subscription quietly bills. The gap between those two timelines is not talent, it is that one person does this daily and the other is learning template software after a full day on the tools. This is the realistic breakdown: what actually happens in a done-for-you week, where DIY builds lose their weeks, the delays that hit every route, and the part nobody budgets time for, which is how long Google takes to notice you exist.

The short answer, route by route

A done-for-you trade website goes live in about a week, a DIY builder site takes three weeks to three months of evenings, and a typical agency quotes four to twelve weeks for the same job.

"How long does a website take" has three honest answers depending on who is holding the tools, and the differences have almost nothing to do with the site itself. A trade website is a small build. What varies is how many other things compete for the builder's attention.

Done for you: about a week

A specialist who builds trade sites constantly has the structure, the checklist and the hosting pipeline already in place, so your site is assembly plus your content, not invention. The week is mostly turnaround: mockup, your feedback, the domain connecting. The actual building is a day or two.

DIY: three weeks to three months, if it finishes

The builder platforms are genuinely capable, and the timeline is still what it is, because you are learning the software, writing the copy, editing the photos and making every design decision yourself, in the evenings, after physical work. Which platform you pick barely moves the number; how they compare on everything else is covered in the best way to build a tradesman website.

Agency: a quarter, and a price to match

Agencies build good sites slowly, because a £500 trade site queues behind £20,000 projects. Four to twelve weeks is standard, with discovery calls and revision rounds that suit a corporate client and baffle a sole trader who just wants the phone to ring.

What happens in a done-for-you week

A one-week trade website build runs: day one, your details and photos in; days two to three, a working mockup built and reviewed; days four to five, your changes made; days six to seven, domain connected, SSL live, site launched.

Here is the actual diary of a Sitework build, so "about a week" is not hand-waving. The only variable is how quickly the content arrives and how fast you reply.

Days 1 to 3: content in, mockup out

You send the raw materials: photos of real jobs, the services you want more of, your towns, your registrations. I build the mockup, a real working version of your site, and send you a link. At Sitework this stage is free and happens before you have paid anything, so the "week" starts with you looking at your own site rather than at a contract.

Days 4 to 5: your tweaks

You look at it on your own phone, show whoever you trust, and send changes: swap that photo, add the emergency call-out line, drop the service you hate doing. Small rounds, done fast. This is the stage that balloons at agencies into "revision cycles"; kept informal it is a day or two.

Days 6 to 7: domain, hosting, live

The domain connects, SSL goes on, the site goes live and gets submitted to Google. If you already own a domain, having the login details ready saves the most common delay in the whole process. If you don't, registering one takes minutes.

Why do DIY builds actually take so long?

DIY website builds run long because the build is only a fifth of the job: writing copy, preparing photos, fixing the mobile layout and making unlimited small decisions consume the hours, and the site is nobody's deadline so it always moves last.

None of this is a criticism of trades. It is what happens when a skilled person does unfamiliar work in leftover hours. The same thing happens in reverse when I pick up a paintbrush.

The four-fifths nobody advertises

Dragging blocks around a template is the easy, advertised bit. The time goes on everything around it: writing about yourself without cringing, cropping fifty photos to find six good ones, discovering the desktop layout is broken on a phone, and choosing between templates that all look the same at 11pm. Each task is small; the stack of them is a project.

No deadline, no launch

A customer's bathroom has a completion date. Your website doesn't. So it loses every scheduling contest all summer, and the half-built site sits there billing its subscription. If you do go DIY, give yourself a real deadline and a short list: the five sections in what to put on a one-page trade website are the whole job. Build those, launch, stop.

The cost of the slow months

The real price of a three-month build is not frustration, it is the quotes that went to trades who were visible while you weren't. Every month un-launched is a month of searches in your town answered by someone else's site. Cheap routes that stay un-launched are the most expensive of all, which is the running theme of the cheapest trade website that doesn't look cheap.

The delays that hit every build (and how to dodge them)

The three delays that stall trade website builds are missing photos, unclear service lists and locked-away domain logins; a trade who has those three ready can go live in days on any route.

Whether you build it or I do, the same three bottlenecks cause almost every overrun, and all three are yours to prevent in advance.

Photos: the number one delay

Nearly every stalled build is waiting for photos. Start collecting now, before anything else: 10 to 15 shots of finished jobs on your phone, taken in daylight, wide enough to see the room or the street. You need six good ones; shoot fifteen to get them. This one habit compresses any build timeline more than any other choice you can make.

The service list and the towns

Write two lists in your notes app: the services you want more of, and the towns you cover. Ten minutes in the van. Vague answers here ("general building, sort of everywhere") produce vague websites and long email chains; two crisp lists produce a site that basically writes itself.

The domain you bought in 2019

If you already own a domain, find out where it is registered and dig out the login before the build starts. Recovering access to a forgotten registrar account is the silliest and most common launch-week delay there is. If there is no domain yet, this is a non-issue; registering a fresh one takes minutes.

Live is not found: the Google timeline

Google typically indexes a new trade website within days to a few weeks, but ranking for local searches like "electrician in Leeds" takes two to six months of the site being live, linked from a Google Business Profile and gathering reviews.

The launch is the start of a second timeline, and it is the one trades get wrong most often, usually by waiting for a quiet season to start. The quiet season is when the clock should already have been running.

Indexing: days to weeks

Google finds new sites by crawling links and reading sitemaps. Google's own Search documentation describes crawling and indexing as taking anywhere from days to a few weeks for a new site, and submitting the sitemap through Search Console shortens the wait. Being indexed just means Google knows the page exists. It says nothing about where it ranks.

Ranking: months, helped by your profile

Local rankings build as the site accumulates signals: a complete Google Business Profile linking to it, reviews mentioning your trade and town, and other pages referring to you. Two to six months is the honest range for competitive local terms. Nothing about that is fast, which is exactly why launching this week beats launching after the kitchen rush.

Start the clock with a free mockup

Every month the site stays hypothetical is a month of the Google timeline not running. I build a free mockup of your actual business first, usually within a few days, before you pay anything. Like it and it is live in about a week, done for you from £50/month with hosting, SSL and unlimited small edits included and no setup fee. What that buys against every other route is itemised on the tradesman website cost page.