Planning a new website build is the perfect time to set definitive goals for what you wish to achieve with your business. With goals set, you can approach a web development company and work with them to establish how you can achieve your ambitions with your new site.
In this article, we’ll look closely at the decision making process, how long your site will take before it starts to achieve your set goals, as well as some technical considerations such as platform selection and content strategy. This guide aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the whole web-build timeline, which should give you some invaluable insights that will help you navigate through some of the common pitfalls and misconceptions about building a new website.
The Initial Planning Stage
This is arguably the most vital phase of the whole project, as it will set you on a trajectory right up until the moment your new site goes live. The decisions you’ll need to make during this stage include:
- Choosing the appropriate web platform (WordPress, Drupal, Webflow, etc.)
- Drawing a structural overview of website functionality and flow
- Outlining the content you’ll need for your website.
- Researching for SEO, includes keyword research and an ideal customer profile.
How long this stage takes to complete will be determined by how complex your new site needs to be and how much research you have already completed. Realistically, plan for a couple months at minimum,
The D&D Stage (Design and Development)
The D&D stage covers a huge range of factors, from the user journey, to the aesthetics and branding of your new site. It incorporates all the functionalities of the site, the content management system and the UX. For smaller sites, a template-based solution, such as those offered by ‘Duda’ can considerably speed up development time to, potentially, just a couple of weeks.
For medium-larger sites, this is certainly the most time consuming phase and typically takes around 3 months for an average sized site. If you have an e-commerce site, then expect it to take longer as you’ll need to populate your new site with your products.
Whatever size site you plan to build, remember that SEO is a separate discipline and will take time to start working, so don’t assume your new site will rank well on Google from day 1 because it almost certainly won’t.
The Content Creation Stage
Depending on your industry, the content creation stage has the potential to take as long as the development phase. Content is vital for your SEO, and your text should be fully optimised with targeted keywords. Images and video content will help to engage your audience and demonstrate to the search engines that your site is packed with valuable content.
If you already have digital content, then you may only need to enhance it, but if you are starting from scratch, you might need to hire content creators to speed up this phase and ensure your content is optimised.
Pre-Launch Testing & Optimisation Stage
Before your site can be made live, you’ll need to test it. Your web developer will be able to test your site on different devices and browsers to grade performance, but it can help to reach out to trusted partners and existing customers for feedback before you press that ‘live’ button.
This stage can take anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple months, depending on the number of revisions you need to make based on feedback received. If you have a mobile app then you can expect this stage to take considerably longer.
The Launch Itself
When your website goes live you’ll undoubtedly find quirks and bugs that were missed in the testing phase. Get on top of these as quickly as you can so as not to negatively impact the user experience and taint your brand going forward.
Your SEO strategy should now be in full swing as your site becomes live for the search engines. You can use tools to monitor website performance, which will help improve rankings and drive traffic.
Post-Launch
Remember to engage with your customers regularly to ask for continual feedback. A site is never ‘100%’ finished, rather, it continues to evolve and adapt as needs change. Make any changes based on real data, and test regularly to ensure your site is performing well. Keywords may change over time too, so remember to evaluate them every few months.
