Carverpoint home

What building your own website costs in hours

What it costs 6 min read

A realistic hour count for building your own website, from writing the words to testing the form, and how to decide whether those evenings are worth spending.

The subscription is cheap and the advertising says it takes an afternoon. So you sit down on a Tuesday evening, pick a template, and by 9:30 you have a header, a logo that is slightly the wrong size, and a growing suspicion that this is going to take more than one Tuesday.

Nothing has gone wrong. The tools genuinely are easier than they used to be. What the price never mentions is that the software was never the slow part.

The software is not what takes the time

Dragging blocks around a page is quick. You can have something that looks like a website inside an hour, and that hour is the one the advertising is describing.

Everything that makes it a useful website rather than a page is separate from the tool: deciding what the site should say, writing it, getting photographs, checking it works on a phone, and making sure an inquiry reaches you. None of that is faster on one platform than another, because none of it happens inside the platform.

So the question to ask is how many evenings the whole job takes.

Writing the words is the real job

This is the part that stalls people, and it stalls them for an ordinary reason: nobody is used to describing their own work in writing.

You need a sentence saying what you do and where. You need a list of services matching the work you actually want, not the work you did five years ago. You need an about page that sounds like a person, and your hours, your area and how you prefer to be contacted.

That is not a lot of words. It is somewhere between three and eight hours of work, and it is the kind of work that goes slowly because every sentence needs a decision behind it. Do you cover that town or not. Do you list a price or not. Do you say emergency call outs when you would rather not be woken up.

Plan for two evenings on the words alone, and expect to change them again a week later.

Photographs take longer than the pages do

Stock photographs of somebody else's smiling plumber will not do you any favors, and you already know this.

Getting your own means a walk around with your phone: the van, the tools laid out, a finished job, the front of the shop, and one of you that does not look like a passport photo. Then it means picking through forty pictures to find six good ones, cropping them, and shrinking the files so the site does not crawl on a phone.

Budget three to four hours, and more if you need to go back to a job to photograph it. If you have never done it before, this is the single largest block of time in the whole project.

Putting the pages together

This is the part the advertising was talking about. Choosing a template, setting the colors, laying out five or six pages and dropping the content in is a few hours once you have the content. Call it four to six for a first attempt, and add a couple more for the finicky parts: the menu that will not line up, the button that goes to the wrong place, the footer that repeats itself.

Add the domain name on top. Buying one is ten minutes. Pointing it at the site can be ten minutes or it can be an evening, depending on whether the two systems talk to each other cleanly.

Testing it is not optional

Fill in your own inquiry form and confirm the email arrives, including into a spam folder. Tap every phone number and check it dials. Open every page on your own phone, then on somebody else's. Check the map points at the right place. Check the hours. Read it once out loud, which finds mistakes that reading silently does not.

Two to three hours, and this is the stage that gets skipped when the project has already taken longer than expected. Skipping it is how a form stops sending for six months without anyone noticing.

Then it does not stop

Prices change. A phone number changes. Christmas hours go up and then need to come down. A service gets added. The platform redesigns its editor and the thing you knew how to do has moved. None of these are large, and all of them arrive on evenings you had planned to spend elsewhere.

An hour or two a month is a fair expectation, unevenly spread, mostly arriving at inconvenient times.

An honest tally

Add these up before you decide anything.

What those hours are actually worth

If a paid hour of your work is worth a meaningful amount and your schedule is full, twenty hours is a real number and you should treat it as a real cost. If you are quiet in January and the alternative to Tuesday evening is the television, twenty hours costs you close to nothing and doing it yourself is the right answer.

Both of those are true and only you know which one you are in. Anybody who tells you the hours do not count is selling something, and so is anybody who tells you they always do.

When doing it yourself is the right call

If you are one person, you work from word of mouth, and what you need is a page with your number, your hours, your area and six photographs of your work, build it yourself. A subscription builder will do that perfectly well, you will be able to change it at midnight without asking anyone, and you will understand exactly how it works because you made it.

The case for handing it over is not that you cannot do it. It is that the hours land in one lump, at the start, at the same time as the rest of your life, and that the parts most likely to go wrong quietly are the parts easiest to skip when you are tired.

Questions people ask

How long does it take to build a small business website?

For a first attempt with a builder, expect fifteen to twenty five hours of your own time, spread over a few weeks. Most of that is writing and photographs rather than the website software.

Is it cheaper to build my own website?

In money, almost always. In time, it depends entirely on what your hours are worth and how busy you are when the work lands.

What takes the longest when building a website?

Writing the words and getting decent photographs. Both sit outside whichever tool you choose, so switching platforms does not make them faster.

How much time does a website take to maintain?

An hour or two a month for a small site, arriving unevenly. The bulk of it is small text changes and checking that the inquiry form still reaches you.

I started building it and stopped halfway. What now?

That is the normal outcome and it is not a failure of yours. Decide whether the stall was the writing, the photographs or the software, because only one of those three is solved by changing platforms.

Read next