Your agency took 9 months to build a 5-page brochure site
A 5-page brochure website - home, about, services, contact, one extras page - is two to four weeks of work for one developer. If your agency took nine months, the bottleneck was not the work. It was your project sitting at the back of a queue while staff cycled through bigger clients.
How long a 5-page brochure site should actually take
A brochure site is the simplest thing a web developer builds. Five pages of text and images, a contact form, a logo, basic styling. No shop, no booking system, no logins.
The realistic timeline, start to finish:
- Week 1: discovery call, gather copy and images, agree the design direction
- Week 2: design mockups, you review, sign off
- Week 3: build the site, hook up the contact form, test on phones
- Week 4: final tweaks, launch, hand over logins
That is four weeks with comfortable breathing room. A focused developer with the content ready can do it in two. Nine months is not a timeline - it is a holding pattern.
Why agencies stretch builds out for months
Agencies rarely have a single person building your site full-time. They have a team juggling fifteen to thirty projects at once. Yours moves forward when someone has a spare afternoon.
The usual reasons a small build drags on:
- You are the smallest fish. The £600 client gets attention after the £15,000 client. Your project waits.
- The work is handed between people. A designer drafts something, then nothing happens for three weeks while it sits in a developer's queue.
- Internal sign-off loops. The account manager reviews, the lead developer reviews, the director reviews. Each step takes a week.
- Project managers chasing themselves. Status meetings about your site count as billable activity even when nothing was built that week.
The agency is not deliberately wasting your time. They are just running a model where small jobs cannot be prioritised without losing money. A nine-month build of a five-page site is not a failure of effort - it is the system working exactly as designed.
What the delay actually cost you
Nine months without a working site is nine months of enquiries you did not get. If you would have closed two extra jobs a month off a working website, that is eighteen jobs gone.
You also paid for the dead time. Most agencies take a deposit upfront and stage payments through the build, so you were funding a project that sat untouched for weeks at a stretch.
And the site you eventually got is the one they would have built in week three. The extra eight months added nothing to the final product.
What to do if you are still waiting
If the site has not launched yet, you have leverage. Email the agency, in writing, and ask for three things:
- A firm launch date with a specific calendar day
- A breakdown of what is left to do
- A refund clause if they miss the date
Put it in an email, not a phone call. You want a paper trail. Most agencies will quietly accelerate once they realise you are documenting the delays.
If they refuse to commit to a date, that is your answer. You can walk. Ask for the work done so far - design files, any code, the domain if they registered it for you. They are legally required to hand over anything you paid for.
What a faster build looks like
A solo developer building your site directly cuts out the queue. There is no account manager, no internal handoff, no sign-off chain. You email the person doing the work, and the work gets done.
SkipTheAgency builds 5-page brochure sites from £600, usually inside three weeks from kickoff to launch. After launch, most clients move onto the Maintained plan at £65/month so the person who built the site is the same person who looks after it.
That is the whole pitch. One developer, one queue of one, your site ships in weeks, not seasons.
Frequently asked questions
How long should it take to build a 5-page website?
Two to four weeks for one developer working on it directly. The first week is gathering content and agreeing the look, the second is design, the third is the actual build, and the fourth is testing and launch. Longer than that and someone is sitting on the work.
Why is my agency taking so long to build my website?
Most likely your project is small compared to their other clients, so it gets attention only when someone has a spare hour. Internal handoffs between designer, developer and account manager add weeks of dead time. The delay is rarely about the difficulty of the work.
Can I get a refund if my agency takes too long to build my site?
It depends on what the contract says about timelines. If no date was specified, you can argue the agency has failed to perform within a reasonable time, which is a standard term implied in service contracts. Get any refund request in writing and reference specific missed milestones.
Should I cancel my contract if the agency keeps missing deadlines?
If the agency cannot commit to a firm launch date in writing, yes. You are unlikely to get a better answer by waiting another month. Ask for any work done so far - design files, domain access - and find someone who can finish the job in weeks.
How much should a simple 5-page website cost?
A hand-coded brochure site from a solo developer typically starts around £600. Agencies charge £1,500 to £5,000 for the same thing because the cost includes the account manager, the sales team and the office. The site itself is the same five pages.
Why do agencies have so many people involved in a small website?
Because the agency model is built around managing many projects in parallel. Account managers, project managers, designers, developers and directors all touch each job. For a 5-page site, most of that overhead is unnecessary and adds weeks to the timeline.
Need your brochure site finished this month, not next year
SkipTheAgency builds 5-page sites from £600, usually inside three weeks. One developer, no queue, no handoffs - just the site you were promised, shipped on time.
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