How to get a website up and running fast

The build is not what takes the time. It has not been for a while.

A competent operator with modern tools can produce a good small business site in hours. When a website takes six weeks, the six weeks are almost entirely spent waiting: for photographs, for a decision on wording, for someone to find the login for a domain registered in 2016.

So the way to go fast is to remove the waiting, and nearly all of it can be removed before the work starts.

The three real delays

Decisions. What does the business do, who for, what should someone do when they land. These sound trivial and are the most common cause of a stalled build, because they are the questions an owner has never had to answer in one sentence.

Assets. Photographs, logo, a list of services, opening hours, the correct phone number. Gathering these takes an afternoon of your time and can hold a project for a fortnight if it is not done in advance.

DNS. Pointing a domain at new hosting can take up to 48 hours to propagate, and there is no way to hurry it. If the domain is with a registrar nobody can log into, this is the step that turns two days into two weeks.

Solve those three and the timeline collapses.

What to prepare before anyone starts

Have these to hand and a build can begin immediately:

• One sentence describing what you do and who for
• The three to six things you want to be hired for, in the words customers use rather than the trade terms
• Name, address, phone number and hours, exactly as they should appear everywhere
• A logo if you have one, and roughly ten photographs of real work
• Domain access, or a decision to buy a new one
• What you want a visitor to do: ring, book, message, or fill in a form. Pick one.

That list is expanded in what we need from you.

Launch small, deliberately

The fastest route to a live site is a smaller site. Not a worse one, a smaller one.

A single page that says what you do, who for, where, and how to get hold of you, with real photographs and a working phone link, outperforms a five-page site that is still in draft. It also gives search engines something to index weeks earlier, which matters because indexing is a queue you want to join early.

Add pages afterwards, once you can see what people actually ask about. That is the argument in the case for a one-page site.

Do these on day one, not later

Two things get skipped in a rush and both cost you weeks if they are:

Claim the Google Business Profile. For a local business this drives more enquiries than the site does, and verification can itself take days, so start it before you need it. See the profile checklist.

Register the domain in your own name. In the rush to launch, plenty of people let whoever is building it register the domain. Fixing that afterwards ranges from awkward to impossible.

What "live" does not mean

A site being live and a site being findable are different events, and the gap surprises people.

New pages typically take days to a few weeks to be indexed. You can shorten it: verify the site in Google Search Console and submit the sitemap, make sure the Business Profile links to it, and get the details consistent everywhere so Google is confident the site and the business are the same entity.

What will not shorten it is refreshing Google every hour, which everybody does anyway.

The realistic timetable

With everything prepared:

• Day one: brief, decisions, assets gathered
• Day one or two: the build
• Day two: review, corrections, domain pointed
• Day two to four: DNS propagates, site live everywhere
• Week one: Search Console, sitemap, Business Profile claimed and completed
• Weeks two to six: indexed, appearing for your own business name, then gradually for what you do

Anyone promising to be top of Google in that window is selling something they cannot deliver. Anyone saying a small business site needs six weeks to build is describing their queue rather than the work.