How long does it take to build a Shopify website?

Shopify is a widely used platform for e-commerce sites. With its amazing functionality, it’s often the first option business owners consider when building a website. But building a Shopify website can take a lot of time, especially for the beginners. In this blog post, we’re giving our answer to the common Shopify question—how long does it take to build a Shopify website?

How long does it actually take to build a Shopify website?

Our initial estimation is that a simple but yet fully functioning Shopify e-commerce site can be developed and completed in a few hours. Developing more complex and customized solutions can take months. In most cases, a full Shopify site development usually takes from 3-7 days.

However, if you’d like to explore additional options, or your client would like some design changes, or to integrate some additional functionalities, you will definitely need more time.

Factors to consider

Our experience shows that there are a few factors that greatly affect the Shopify site building speed:

• Web developer experience—if you’re a novice developer, or not quite familiar with the Shopify platform, it’s very likely that you will need significantly more time to develop a fully functional Shopify website in comparison to a seasoned developer.
• The size of the ecommerce store—Usually, bugger e-commerce stores with lots of products and variations require more customization, adaptations, and additional functionality, like filters, display options, recommended products shown on different pages, category optimization, and more.
• The additional functionalities and integrations—if you require some additional functionalities, like pop-ups, geo-targeting, or adding different payment methods, Shopify site development will take more time.
• Design customization—if your client would like some front-end design adjustments, developing such solutions will add to the overall time of building a Shopify website.
  

Is it easy to build a Shopify site?

Our opinion is that building a Shopify site doesn’t require a ton of technical knowledge. The platform itself has many attractive store templates you can use for your e-commerce site. However, if you want some additional integrations, design options and functionalities, you might want to reach out to a seasoned e-commerce developer. The building process consists of a few easy and logical steps.

Steps of building a Shopify site

Usually the process is easy and straightforward. Here are the Shopify building phases:

1. Creating an account at Shopify—the first initial step would be to create your account at Shopify to start adding your products to the store. After that, the fun of creating an online store begins, which is also the harder part.
2. Select your Shopify theme—once you create your Shopify account, the first step in setting up your store is choosing your store theme. Since Shopify provides plenty of options, this can be a tricky task. However, keeping your store design as simple as possible and responsive would be a safe bet.
3. Start adding your products—in this phase, you start the actual work of populating your store with products and variations. For each of the product, you need to select names, set up URL structure, and provide descriptions and images. 
4. Set up your checkout page and integrate desired payment methods—with Shopify checkouts, you have plenty of options, too. You can customize the checkout forms and integrate the payment methods you want. This phase might require some user experience testing and integrations checks because you want to make sure all is working as it should.
5. Set the shipping and refund policies—a huge part of e-commerce businesses, but often neglected by many. Potential buyers will look for proofs that your store is a legit one, so providing this kind of data is hugely beneficial.
6. Optimize your store for SEO—work on SEO should start as soon as possible, since some SEO elements should be defined from the beginning, such as the site structure, permalinks, category pages and internal links.
7. Domain registration and launching the site—And finally, you need to purchase your domain to launch the site. A domain registration can be done on numerous web hosting websites. You just need to pick the name of your domain in advance.
   

Tips to have in mind when building a Shopify website

Here are a few useful tips we have compiled for you to facilitate and speed up the developing of your Shopify store:

• Prepare product copy and images in advance—a huge delay in building your online store happens when you have to wait for images or copywriters to create your product copy. Therefore, it’s always best to prepare it in advance to speed things up.
• Test your store for user experience and page speed
• Ask an expert for help if you get stuck—fixing a site glitch can take a lot of time if you don’t have enough experience. Therefore, it’s best to look out for professionals’ help.
• Test your site before the launching—the last thing you need is to launch a site only to figure out it’s not mobile friendly, the checkout is incomplete, or the user experience is bad. Therefore, always test things before launching.
• Optimize the site for search engines before launching—check if all SEO site settings are correctly set up, optimize your permalink structure, check robots.txt files, and if all important pages can be crawled and indexed.
  

Who to contact for Shopify store development?

DesignQ has more than 15 years of responsive e-commerce web design experience. We have helped dozens of online stores get the stellar web presence with the Shopify platform. Contact us today to discuss your future project ideas in details.