NOTE: This post might contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. It helps support the blog. Thanks.
There is a saying that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and that totally fits here. Building an eCommerce website for your business is the best thing you can do, but “how many hours does it take to build an eCommerce website” is a big question.
In order to know, how many hours it takes to build a fully functional eCommerce website, you need to be very clear with the idea, functionality, and design of your website so that you can start your process of building a website straight away.
Once you have decided the functionalities and everything, now you need to decide how you want your website to be built. I mean, you have 2 options either through code your website or through Content Management Systems (e.g WordPress, Wix). CMS will definitely reduce most of the efforts and will save a lot of time whereas, coding a website on your own will give you a free hand to make tweaks as per your need.
How many hours it will take to build eCommerce website
Well, the answer to this question totally depends on what model you choose to build your website. Here, I will tell you the minimum time taken in both cases(WordPress/Wix or coding), if you go with WordPress you gonna save a lot of time. Building a complete eCommerce website will take 2 days using WordPress.
But if you are interested in coding your website then it might take 20 days or 480 hours (working hours), this is a minimum time if you have got a team of professional developers. These timing may vary due to several factors, and we will discuss all of them in this article. So, without any further ado, let’s dive in.
How and where to start
First things first, decide how you want to build your website.
Content Management System:
Follow these steps in order to complete your website in the most efficient way. This guide will help you to complete your eCommerce website within 48 hours.
- Hosting
- Domain
- Install WordPress
- Select Theme
- Install Necessary Plugins
- Edit Theme
- Set Woo Commerce
- Add Products
- Testing
- Launch the Final Product
I’ll be dividing the process of building an eCommerce website into several parts, that will help you to keep doing things in proper sequence. Keep in mind that this is not a fixed method, all this is to schedule your work of building a website in as little time as possible.
0-6 Hours:
Once you have decided on CMS then you are free to choose Wix or WordPress, or even Shopify. After choosing the platform register a domain name and hosting and install WordPress (I’ll go with WordPress in this article, you can go with Wix or Shopify) onto your website.
Once you have done this, you are almost ready to start working on your website.
Now, you are all set to decide how your website will look, I mean you need to select the right theme for your website. It might be like finding a perfect fish to eat from an ocean full of them. There are thousands of free and premium themes you can choose from, go with as per your needs.
Add a beautiful logo, favicon, and make all possible changes that are required to be made in the theme. Changing the fonts, color scheme, heading styles, text color, all are the basic things that we must keep in mind while editing your website.
The first 6 hours are important and the base of your eCommerce store. After spending 6 hours you are done with 40% of your website, and all this will hardly take 4-5 hours at stretch, after completing this you may re-check what you have done if you still have time left. But the core designing will start from here. So, let’s begin our journey.
6-12 Hours:
Install all the necessary plugins like Elementor, WooCommerce, Image Compression, Site Optimization, etc. After installing these plugins, tune them as per your requirements. Now it’s time to make changes to the theme. Make changes like logo, favicon, color scheme, font, menu, background, and many other small settings.
12-24 Hours:
Adding products may take a lot of time, the reason being you need to add and edit each product individually. Adding descriptions, pricing, taxes, sizes, and changing all other details will consume a lot of time, but we need not worry as we still have 30 hours left as per our schedule.
The main time-consuming will be the changes to the theme while adding products. Once you have added products and set everything else now it’s time to set WooCommerce.
24-30 Hours:
WooCommerce is all about the eCommerce thing, here you need to set pricing, shipping rate, coupons, product categories, payment method, Update taxation rules, and everything else that is related to your eCommerce business.
And this is it, your website is ready to launch, but you might not rush. It is a better option to check and test your website thoroughly.
Take a look at the clock, as you might have taken nearly 30 hours of work to do all these things. Now in the next 18 hours, you can do thorough testing of your website and fix the bugs which might appear in the process.
As you have seen your eCommerce business is ready to be launched in the market within 48 hours.
Coding:
Follow these steps in order to complete your website in the most efficient way to complete your eCommerce website in 20 Days.
- Design a Blueprint
- Finalize UI
- Start Coding
- Test Each Module
- Add Products
- Add Payment Methods
- Final Testing
- Launch the Website
Well, if you have chosen this option then there is a lot you can do. This will be time-consuming, but it’s worth it. You can do numerous customizations which is difficult to do in the case of CMSs. If you can spend more time and money then it’s a good decision to go with building a site with code.
Day 1:
Now, the very first thing is to have a blueprint of your website. You should have an idea about 70-80% of how your website should look alike, then only you can start. Sit with your team, have a deep discussion and share your thoughts with your designers.
Day 2:
Once blueprinting is done, choose the theme, the color scheme for the site. Ask your graphic designer to provide various UI templates so that you can pick one for your website. Once this is done you are good to go with the coding part.
Day 3:
Code different pages separately, don’t rush to distribute 7 pages to seven different developers. Design pages in sequence, a landing page is the most important, you need to spend maximum time to decide the layout that suits with the theme of your website.
Day 4 – Day 15:
This phase is the most crucial and the most time-consuming, but we really need to focus and creative in this phase. It is better to spend more time in those areas which matter the most. In this period you will code the whole website which commences with the landing page and culminates at the check-out page.
Once you are done with a landing page then you must add static pages. Pages like contact-us, about-us, privacy policy, FAQs, help section, 404 error page, and others as per your requirement. These pages will take few hours to build and most of your tasks will be done.
Now you only need to design product pages, cart, checkout, and pages with complex functionalities, they may take time but are really crucial for an online store.
Integrating payment methods will be really tough and you need to find a reliable source to receive payments.
Day 16:
Once all these pages are done, you can start adding products to your store. Adding products to the store is really a time-consuming task. You should spend a good amount of time adding and categorizing them, as these are the main essence of the website.
Day 17:
Optimize your website. eCommerce websites have tons of data and generally becomes slow by the end of finalizing the process. Try to reduce the sizes of images that you have added with your products, that will really help. Minify your CSS, and JavaScript to reduce the loading time. Your site must be beautiful, light, and fast. Spend some time with your developers to make things smoother and faster.
Day 18:
SEO. You might know that this is also a very important part of a website. If it will rank in top results then only you will get organic traffic. So, spend some time doing SEO for your website.
Day 19 & 20:
By this moment you are almost done with your website, but one thing which is left is testing. eCommerce websites are the most critical ones so, you need to test for almost 2 entire days so that you can check each and every corner of your website. In this phase, you may ask your friends to participate and make a dummy order so that you may check the entire process.
Congratulations, you are ready with your website. There is one thing to keep in mind that in the case of coding your website, time will depend on your developers. If you are having a good team of professional developers then it might take 10 days but if you are just a newbie then it might take much more days or even months. Building an eCommerce store is not a cup of cake, you have to look at each aspect to get better results.
Bonus
Once you are done with the development phase now it’s time to market your brand and to get better results you need good strategies.
I am sharing this from personal experience that Instagram is the best way to promote your products. Get a shout out from influencers, make your own Instagram page and post relevant content which will drive more attention of the audience towards your brand.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, I would like to say that development time totally depends upon your developers. So, don’t rush to complete your website quickly, take the proper time, give proper thoughts to every module and test them perfectly so that your customers should not have anything to complain about. A happy customer is a sign of returning customers.
The world is shifting towards the CMS (WIX/ WordPress) as they save time and cost, along with that you can spend that massive amount on marketing, which is the main essence of your whole business.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this article. Feel free to share your experience in the comment sections. See you lads in the next post. Cheers 🙂
