How long an estate agency website takes.

How long a website takes depends mostly on what kind of website it is. At one end, some providers publish that a template can be live within a day. At the other, published estimates for a full build run to several months. Our comparison of estate agency website companies lists what each one publishes, checked against their own websites every week.

Ours takes weeks rather than days, because most of the work is the thinking, not the assembly. The gap between a day and a few months is not typing speed: it is the brief, the words, the design decisions, the property feed and the move from the old site, and several of those depend on people other than the builder.

Every studio names these differently, but a bespoke agency website goes through the same steps.

1. Brief and research. Who the agency is for, which patch it wants to own, who it is up against, and how it actually wins instructions. In our process this is discovery, and you know where you sit in the price range before you commit to anything.
2. Content and photography. The words for every page, the team, the office and the areas you cover. This should run alongside the design rather than after it, because a page designed around real words fits them, and one designed around placeholder text often has to be redone. If you need new photography, book it early: it sits outside most build prices, ours included.
3. Design. Ours is two directions, one chosen, then every page designed before a line of code is written. The time here goes on decisions more than drawing.
4. Build. The designs become a working site: property search, listing pages, valuation booking and the local pages for your patch.
5. The property feed. Your CRM is connected so listings arrive on the site by themselves and always match the office. This is the stage you control least, so it has its own section below.
6. Testing on phones. On real phones, not a desktop browser made narrow: the search, the listings and the booking, start to finish.
7. Launch and redirects. The domain is pointed at the new site, and every old address that matters is redirected to its new home on the same day.

How we run each of these is set out on our website design page.

Your listings reach the website through a feed from your CRM, and every CRM has its own route: some publish developer documentation, some need an integration set up on their side first, and some charge for access. Our CRM pages set out what each of the main ones publishes, checked every week: Reapit, Alto, Street, Dezrez, Jupix and Expert Agent.

For the timetable, the point is that access has to be arranged with the CRM provider, and that runs on their calendar rather than the builder’s. So ask for it in the first week, not the week before launch, and ask at the same time whether the provider charges for the feed. Nobody wants to learn about a monthly fee after the design is signed off.

Launch day is when rankings are at risk. Here is how to protect them, mostly from Google’s own documentation on site moves.

• Keep the same domain. Moving the website is one thing; moving the address as well starts search engines from nothing.
• List every old address and decide where each one goes. Area pages and anything other sites link to matter most.
• Use permanent redirects. Google recommends server side permanent redirects, such as 301 or 308. A permanent redirect tells Google to show the new address in its results; a temporary one keeps the old address showing.
• Do not send everything to the homepage. Google warns that redirecting many old addresses to one unrelated page, such as the new homepage, confuses visitors and can be treated as a soft 404. Pages with no equivalent on the new site should return a 404 or 410 instead.
• Keep the redirects for at least a year, and longer if you can, so Google can carry everything across to the new addresses.
• Tell Google. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, and change the site’s internal links to the new addresses.

Even when all of that is done well, Google says that on a medium sized website it can take a few weeks or more before the new addresses replace the old ones in its results, and that rankings can move about temporarily during a move. It suggests timing a move for a dip in traffic, so if you know your quiet weeks, launch in one of them rather than in your busiest.

Individual property pages are a special case. Their addresses are often built from the CRM’s own reference numbers, so they change when the website or the CRM changes, and old property links should be pointed somewhere sensible rather than left to break. We map the old site’s addresses before launch and redirect them on the day.

A builder can only move as fast as four things arrive, and all four sit with the agency or with another company.

• Words and photographs. A page cannot be finished until its content is. With us the writing is part of the build, but it still needs your facts: the team, the fees you are happy to publish, the areas you cover.
• Access to the CRM feed. As above, it depends on another company. Ask on day one.
• Access to the domain. Launching means changing where the domain points, which needs the login for the account it is registered in. If the domain is registered to your current supplier rather than the agency, that has to be put right first, and it is much easier while everyone is still on good terms. Who owns your estate agency website explains what to check.
• Approvals. Every round of sign-off adds time, and a design that has to go past four partners takes longer than one that goes past one. Agree at the start who has the final say.

A lot of agency websites are rented on fixed terms, and published terms of two or three years are common; the same comparison page shows each company’s. If you are on a term like that, the date that matters is not the end of the contract but the last day you can give notice.

Work backwards from it:

1. Find the notice period in writing, and the date the old site actually switches off.
2. Check the domain first. Confirm it is registered to the agency and that you can log in to the account it sits in, before you give notice rather than after.
3. Start the new build early enough to finish before the old site ends, with room to spare. A bespoke build is measured in weeks, and some published estimates run to months.
4. Save a list of every address on the old site while it is still live, so the redirects can be mapped from the real thing.
5. If your website came with your CRM, it usually goes when the CRM goes, because it is part of the same product. Plan the new website before you give notice on either.
6. Overlap rather than gap. A few weeks of paying for two websites is better than a stretch where the old one has gone and the new one is not ready, because that is when the rankings and the enquiries go missing.

Treat the contract end as the deadline for launch, not the start of the project.

• Google Search Central: Site moves with URL changes
• Google Search Central: Redirects and Google Search

More guides for agency owners are on the guides page.