How Long Does it Take to Build a Website on WordPress?

It’s easy to feel lost and confused when you are building your first website in WordPress and expecting your project to get off the ground sooner so if you don’t have a clue on what to do, don’t worry – you are not alone! With multiple steps required for completing the procedure, a new WordPress user can feel complications in understanding and planning.

Now the question that must be arising in your mind is how long will it take? The entire process can be completed in a few weeks or may take even months depending on the number of elements and contents to be added to the site. The key to success is to remain organized and take one step after another till you reach the end. Websites with lesser content should be ready quickly when compared to websites with a bunch of content to be loaded on to.

How should you make it happen? Let’s take the journey through the most convincing steps to building your WordPress website with ease.

What the process of WordPress website development looks like?

Execution of this process can vary depending on the nature of your website and its overall scope. It should start with the planning of what your website should include, how much and how it should finally look. The next thing you take up is the technical elements like hosting and domain. Finally, the real work and the toughest part begin with working and building pages, content writing, customization, the addition of themes and a lot more.

If you are new to the game, it should take a few more days to get yourself familiar with how WordPress websites work on the surface. When you are using website building functionality themes, it means you are choosing to create a website from scratch and it becomes a lot easier. If you are not scared of tweaking your theme, you might also opt for a manual approach. Even if it takes longer than expected, you ensure yourself a lot more control through the overall process.

If you have plenty of experience under your belt with site builder for WordPress, chances are that you won't take more than a few hours to get everything ready. However, in most other cases, creating WordPress websites might take a little longer than expected. Even after you have completed creating the website and doing all it requires for the website to go live, it may still require some really important revisions and tweaks to make sure it is working just like the way you want it to.

How long should the WordPress website building take?

How long it will take should depend on these factors that we are going to discuss below.

Research your competitors

There are multiple competitor analysis tools that can help you keep track of what your competitors are doing. The idea is not to become lazy and simply copy someone’s work but it’s for the sake of making your website better. Additionally, you can discover newer trends and also explore a better and faster way of being more creative than your competition. It can also help you uncover solutions you were not aware of. For example, just when you fail to find a solution to a problem and are planning to get back to the client informing him about how the work seems impossible, just then you discover that your competitors are already doing it. Maybe you found a new plugin or a new tool you weren’t aware of!

Know your audience and what they are looking for

The more information you gather, the better. It’s a good idea to recollect things like sales information and brochures related to the company. You need to know who your audiences are and what actually your target market demands and expects from you. Know what they like and the kind of websites that are popular among them. Find out what they can ‘personally relate’ with. Any emotion, any demands that are desired needs to be caught into your radar.

Create a marketing and SEO strategy

You need to make sure that you are following the right SEO strategy that is ultimately intended to making your website successful. You might want to go through important tutorials and set up certain things like default site titles, permalinks, default post titles, default pages and post descriptions without any delay. Different SEO programs handle these differently and it makes sense to spend some time learning them.

All in all, you will not require anything less than 2 hours to invest in learning the basics of SEO. It is important to do things right from the start and follow a suitable order when it comes to SEO. As a result, you easily get found on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. In the process, you need to stay away from SEO hucksters who can fool with an illusion of getting highly listed on search engines on an exchange of money.

Map out a structure of your website

When you plan to map out the structure of your new website, it's like planning its future. Before you can finally decide on website copy or images, it makes sense to sit down and decide on the website structure. WordPress website usually looks like a house and works like one since you need to decide what you should have to do to make it look wonderful to visitors and how it should finally look from the outside. Designers might stick to analog written tree or mind mapping tool showing the pages. Going through the pages should give you a better idea of what you need to do and what all needs to be skipped.

The first page of your website should be your homepage and that needs to be supported by the following pages of about us, service, blog, contact and so on. In case of further sub-pages to be added, you need to list them under a suitable page to maintain order. SEO, web design, graphic design and logo designs are some of the important sub-pages that you must have. It is possible to alter the placement of the subpages as they can be moved around with the help of the WordPress menu. Assume the number of hours required for completing the web pages and work accordingly.

Select a theme that is fast and user-friendly

Most of the newer themes available for WordPress websites are user-friendly and thankfully, you are spoilt for choices when it comes to WordPress themes but knowing which one suits your requirements is a big deal. The choice should depend on multiple factors like features, personal preference, stats and so on. Even if you don't pick the fastest theme, you can always optimize your website speed later on.

Add necessary plugins for SEO, backups, and security

Once you have selected the WordPress theme for your website and have got it installed, you need to look at what plugins you actually require. These must not be skipped for later so else your website might face issues at the earlier stages. What are the plugins that you need to consider for your website? Let's take a look.

Security plugins

Before installing just anything on your website, its important for you to have security plugins. WordPress websites are unfortunately a favorite of most hackers and it's targeted often because hackers are busy scanning your WordPress website for broken and outdated software. A decent security tool needs to be chosen to avoid hacking by bots (such hacking is usually done by bots).

Backup plugins

Every website requires backup since the hackers can still make through all security gates on your website and mess things up hence having a backup in such cases is often a lifesaver that doesn’t deserve a miss. It’s a bad idea to completely rely on your hosts for website backup as they might not always have a recent backup of your website saved for you in case of emergency and all might become a messy process. Even if you have no idea how SEO plugins work, still you need to install one.

Write out content for the home page and other pages

Before you plan to design your pages, you need to find out who will be writing your content because in most cases, clients don’t easily come up with content ready on their part. Sales information and brochure can be of good help for preparing contents and with more information in your kitty, you are on the right edge. Make sure that you can copy save major details on the information pages.

If yours is a new website and you are into the process of bootstrapping, then getting your own copywritten can be helpful. Try to maintain a simple website lingo and talk to your customer as you talk to a friend. Audiences are fond of simple and friendly websites, they don’t like complications. Depending on the requirement of content, this process can take several hours or even months.

Decide whether you're going to need a blog

New website owners are often in a dilemma of whether or not they require blogging on their website. The answer to this is a NO if you are not going to commit updating your blog with new contents daily, weekly or at least monthly. It is indeed a good part of your marketing strategy, only if you choose to update it from time to time.

The first step to blogging is laying out a plan on how you are going to use your blog. It is important to analyze how you will be placing your images, using your advertising space and what all you are going to write about. Just make sure that when you are mapping out everything, you also plan out on categories to be included on the blog. This might take you a few hours depending on your initial page timing.

Install an SSL certificate

SSL is one of the most important security trends that is taking place through Google updates. If you have a website that is not running SSL, then chances are that your website might be showing up further down in ranking from other pages in Google. SSL does not just make your website look professional but also makes it found on search engines. Websites that don’t have SSL might be blocked or the user may be shown warning messages for browsing the website further.

Installation of SSL is not a complicated thing and you can always take help from free services to secure your WordPress website. They provide you with easy and special instructions on how you can set up SSL on your website. While few of these services can do most of your work, some might also take a little more of your time to complete the setup. You can also choose to buy SSL certificates with the help of google SSL or host. They can help you walk through the process of installation with much ease.

Add Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to your website

Facebook pixel is the kind of code that you can add to your WordPress website. It further collects useful data to help you keep a track of conversions flowing in from Facebook ads and optimize ads and build some good targeted audiences for the future. You can also target your new audiences who have already chosen to browse your WordPress website.

Analytics is one of the most popular and successful services by Google as it can keep track of most of the things that happen on your WordPress website such as bounce rates, number of pages and users and so on. Google Analytics is believed to be the best friend of any marketer here. There are many people who absolutely have no idea about the number of customers making a visit on their website on a regular basis. Just remember, what gets tracked ultimately gets managed so just ensure that you are tracking as much as you require without creating an issue for your customers. You can expect somewhere around 2-4 hours for the setup.

Connect your website with Google Search Console

Google search console can help locate what your website is doing the right or wrong way and whether you are getting desired traffic from the organic search. You can ping your site map to top search engines as it can be one of the fastest ways to determine if your WordPress website has actually been searched by Google.

Now with all these steps in place, it’s expected that you have spent almost one month working on your new WordPress site. Right from the initial planning stages to giving the final touches to your website design, you want everything to fall in place. Before your website goes public, it’s always recommended to go through your entire work and look for loopholes, if any. You might find areas for improvement in most of the cases.

There are a few issues that need to be taken into consideration. Here are the top things that you need to keep your eyes at:

• Non-loading elements and typos: Probably some of the most glaring kind of elements that easily catch attention; you are likely to locate them if you take a look at them closely.
  
  
• Slow-loading pages: Your website might feel slow when you plan to launch it and slower loading pages are a threat to your future traffic inflow. Make sure that you have got everything optimized and fix this issue as soon as possible. With a slow-loading website, you are losing more audiences than expected.
  
  
• The website looks poor on mobile: Mobile versions of a website are extremely important and need to run smoothly on all similar devices simply because of the fact that more than 70% of your traffic might come from smartphone users who are likely to browse your website on their phones than a laptop or other devices. Focusing only on the desktop experience of the users for a new WordPress website seems to be a huge mistake in today’s time.

You might end up making a few last-minute changes before your WordPress website can finally go public. However, sweating up things too much at this stage may not always be recommended. Even if you plan to take a few more couples of days to go through your website again, delaying its launch too much unless you don’t find your key functionality working is not a good idea. You can always keep making vital improvements as you continue to go along.

Building a WordPress website for a huge audience or a large business can be a real challenge with the project taking more than a few months to reach its final stage. You might have multiple people working on the project and even the website might require multiple levels of revisions. On the other hand, with lesser scope, you are likely to take lesser time to create a WordPress website.

You should also spend some time maintaining website themes and site plugins as they need to be updated from time to time. Website backup must also be needed on a regular basis. You can get your own hosting at the start and upgrade later. All of these might require plenty of time and upfront work but once you have taken the right path and completed the job well, you can expect good returns for long.