How Long Does it Take to Develop a WordPress Website?
The estimate of time in building a website depends on a lot of factors. No one can give an exact estimate of how long it will take to develop a WordPress website. In the best-case scenario with an experienced WordPress developer, some might get built in a few hours, while others can take up to six or more months.
It all depends on the website’s scope, planning and execution, team, and other technicalities. The steps of creating a WordPress website are more or less similar to building any website.
It starts with planning, domain registration, hosting, building pages of the site, then adding the site’s content, customizing the theme, testing, and final delivery. There may be a chance that a client needs modification and a few tweaks even after the delivery of the website. Client satisfaction is another critical aspect of determining how long the website will take to be completed.
Since there is no means to know the exact effort estimation of a WordPress website, we are going to share the steps needed to build a WP website:
Planning
Planning is the first step of any project. Before starting any project, you need to work on the structure of the website. The website’s design helps you define the specific goals; thus, planning is done to achieve these goals. A website with no plan is like hitting in the dark. Let’s explore the steps for planning before you build it:
● Set your purpose for creating a website
● Find who your target audience is
● What features will make your website relevant to users’ needs?
● Create a budget.
● Select your WordPress theme
● Assign roles to website designer and developer
● Create a content strategy
● Create a test plan
● Launch your website
You can never reach your target without determining what your goals are. Goals help you to complete the project step by step, moving forward in the right direction. Work Plan might take a day or two to get prepared.
Find a Hosting Service and Buy a Domain
Once you have planned out the tasks and know what is needed, you can buy a domain that best matches the requirement. It should be something that hits people’s minds and is easy to remember. This is an important decision and suggestions should be welcomed from wherever you can receive them.
It will legitimize your brand with a name and will represent it for years. Next, you can find reliable web hosts available on the internet and choose a plan that best suits your pocket and requirement. There are many providers that offer WordPress hosting, but you can start your search here.
Install WordPress and Select a Theme
To start building a WordPress website, you need to install WordPress on your system. For an experienced developer, it is a matter of five to ten minutes. For a novice, several web host service providers help you with the installation, which takes just five minutes to get the work done. Once the installation is complete, you will view the dashboard and other elements present on the website.
WordPress codex comes with 600 plugins to choose from. Take time to understand the plugins, tools, and different aspects of WordPress, and then select a theme that you think would help you engagingly represent your brand.
This might take a few hours as there are thousands of articles available, both free and paid. Theme selection should fully cover your essential requirement of mobile-friendliness, eye-catching colors, and options to customize it as per your requirement. Do check the reviews of the theme before selection.
Create Pages and Install the Plugins
The site’s actual building starts with creating pages required by the client and integrating plugins to shape the website.
In WordPress, almost everything requires installing and activating plugins. You and your team must know which plugin to look for and add to the site to achieve the desired layout.
Some themes come with pre-built modules that need to be added to the page and rearranged. Site builder helps you to achieve the aspired effect in a few hours. For a custom website, an experienced WordPress developer would be helpful. This step of creating a WP website depends on the actual requirement and expertise a WordPress developer possesses.
Test and Launch the Website
This is the final and the most crucial step in any website development project. Testing is done to check whether the website is developed as per the client’s requirements. The testing team finds errors and retests them once the development team makes the necessary changes.
When the website becomes completely error-free and gets a thumbs up from the client, you can prepare to launch it on the server. Do remember to test the live website too. Sometimes a live website shows errors that might not have been encountered on a testing server.
Conclusion
Effort estimation and evaluation is a process that depends on the client’s requirements and the nature of the website. Complex websites take longer to complete in comparison to simple ones. No matter what the work scope is, if the WordPress development agency is an experienced one, things can take less time to complete, and the result will be worth appreciating.
