Your agency has been saying the site is nearly ready for a year

What 'nearly ready' actually means

'Nearly ready' is the safest thing an agency can say. It commits to nothing. It buys another two weeks before you ask again.

What it usually translates to in practice is one of three things. Either no one has touched the site this month, the person who started it has left, or it is being built by someone juggling six other projects who gets to yours on Friday afternoons.

The phrase 'final stages' is in the same category. So is 'just waiting on one last thing' and 'going through QA'. None of these are timelines. They are stalling phrases that sound like progress.

Why agency builds stall for a year

A small business website - five to ten pages, a contact form, a few photos - is roughly four to eight weeks of actual work. Sometimes less. The reason yours has taken a year is almost never technical.

The usual reasons:

• You are not a priority. The agency took on a bigger client and yours got moved to the back of the queue. Every queue.
• Staff turnover. The designer or developer who started your build has left. Whoever inherited it is reluctant to touch someone else's half-finished work.
• Sign-off bottleneck. They sent you a draft, you sent feedback, they took six weeks to action it, you took two weeks to look at it, and the cycle repeats. Multiply by ten rounds.
• It is being subcontracted. The agency you hired is not doing the work. They are passing it to a freelancer or an overseas team and chasing them just like you are chasing the agency.
• They have lost interest. The deposit is spent, the remaining balance is small, and the build now loses them money to finish. It is easier to keep saying 'nearly ready' than to write off the project formally.

None of these are your problem to solve. You paid for a website on an agreed timeline. The internal mess on their side is not something you owe patience for.

Questions to ask your agency right now

Send one email. Keep it short. Ask exactly these questions and ask for a written reply:

• What is the specific date the site will go live?
• What tasks remain between now and that date?
• Who is the named person currently doing the work?
• Can I see the site as it stands today, on a preview link?

The preview link is the important one. If they cannot show you the site in its current state within a day or two, the site does not exist in any meaningful form. There is no half-built version sitting on a server. They have not started, or they have started and abandoned it.

If they refuse, deflect, or send another 'nearly ready' reply with no date, you have your answer. The 'just waiting on one last thing' line has now been deployed at least three times by my count.

How to get your money or your site back

You have two options and you should pick one within the next fortnight.

Option one: set a hard deadline. Write to them stating that under the agreed contract, the site must be delivered by a specific date - give them four weeks - or you will be requesting a refund of your deposit under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Services must be provided within a reasonable time. A year is not a reasonable time for a small business website.

Keep the email factual. No anger, no threats, just dates and consequences. Send it from an address you can prove ownership of, and keep copies.

Option two: walk away and rebuild. If the deposit was small relative to the cost of waiting another six months, write off the loss and start again with someone who will actually finish. Ask the agency in writing for any work completed so far - copy, photos you supplied, any draft designs. They owe you these even if the site never launched.

If they registered a domain in their name on your behalf, ask for it to be transferred to you. They are required to do this. The domain is yours regardless of who set it up.

What a realistic build timeline looks like

For a standard small business site - homepage, about, services, contact, a few extras - here is what reasonable looks like:

• Week 1: brief, gather copy and photos, agree the structure
• Weeks 2-3: design and build
• Week 4: review, revisions, sign-off
• Week 5: launch

Add a week or two if you are slow to send content, or if you want a bespoke design rather than a tidy template. Six to eight weeks end to end is normal. Twelve weeks is on the long side. Twelve months is not a build, it is a hostage situation.

Whether you run a salon in Leeds or a small accountancy in Bristol, the work involved is the same and the timeline should be measured in weeks, not seasons.

If you want to start over with someone who quotes a date and hits it, I build sites from £600 with a clear four to six week timeline and a fixed price. After launch, most clients move onto the Maintained plan at £65/month so the site keeps getting looked after by the person who built it. No queue, no 'nearly ready', no surprises.