Planning a new website?
This guide covers realistic timelines, costs and what each budget tier actually buys you.
Need it live this week?
Launch48 delivers a complete site in 48 hours for $699, first month of maintenance included.
Last updated: August 2026
Where six weeks normally goes
On a traditional build, coding is the minority of the timeline. The schedule is: discovery and proposals, design mockups with revision rounds, waiting for your text and photos, development, then review. Two of those five phases are pure waiting. A rapid build attacks the waiting, not the work.
How a 48-hour build is structured
Hour 0: a kickoff call where content, branding, page list and decisions are collected in one focused session. Hour 8: the design draft lands in your inbox. Hour 24: the complete site is on staging for review. Hour 36: your revisions are applied. Hour 44: SSL, backups, firewall and analytics are configured. Hour 48: live on your domain. The clock is published because a fixed process is the product.
What you get, and what you do not
Included: up to five professionally designed pages, mobile responsive, working and tested contact forms, on-page SEO foundations, SSL, analytics, image optimization and security hardening at launch.
Not included, from anyone honest: custom illustration, brand identity design from scratch, copywriting for ten pages, complex integrations like booking engines or membership areas, and full ecommerce stores. Anyone promising all of that in two days is describing a template dump with your logo on it.
How to actually hit the deadline
Speed depends more on you than on the builder. Have ready: your logo, brand colors if any, rough text for each page, 10 to 20 photos, your service list, and a decision on where form submissions should go. Businesses that arrive prepared launch in 48 hours; businesses that promise to send content "next week" launch next month, regardless of who they hired.
Same-day websites: when they are real
A genuine same-day launch is possible for a single-page site: one clear service, a strong headline, a form and a phone number. That is a real and often ideal product for a new business, a launch campaign or a trade needing a professional presence before Monday. Five-page sites in a single day usually mean corners were cut somewhere you will find later.
The question to ask before you buy speed
Who maintains it starting day three? A fast launch with nobody watching becomes the neglected site in our hacked website guide within a year. Our 48-hour build is $699 flat and includes the first month of maintenance free precisely because a website's real life begins after launch.
FAQ
Is a $699 website worse than a $7,000 one? Different products. The expensive build buys custom design and strategy; the fixed-scope build buys speed and correctness on a proven structure. For a business that needs to exist online this week, shipped beats perfect.
Can I upgrade the design later? Yes, and that is the sensible sequence: launch, start earning, then reinvest in custom design when revenue justifies it.
What if I need more than five pages? Additional pages are quoted upfront, ours at $99 each, agreed before kickoff so the price never moves mid-project.
Do rapid builds hurt SEO? No, when built properly: clean structure, fast loading, correct titles and metadata, indexable from day one. Rankings then come from content and time, as they do for any site.
Need a website, not a six-week project?
Launch48 delivers a complete five-page business website in 48 hours for $699 flat, mobile-ready, secure and fast at launch, with your first month of maintenance included.