The build was quoted at three weeks. It’s been nine. You’ve started wondering whether you hired the wrong people.
Go back through the emails. Somewhere around week two there’s a message asking for your service descriptions, and somewhere around week three there’s a polite follow-up, and you meant to get to it after that big job finished.
This is the most common reason a website is late, by a distance. Everyone in the industry knows it. Almost nobody says it out loud during the sales call.
Why it happens to competent people
Writing about your own business is genuinely hard, and it’s hard in a way that surprises people who are good at their jobs.
You know what you do so thoroughly that you can’t see which parts a stranger needs explained. You’ve said your pitch on the phone a thousand times, and it works on the phone, and it reads terribly when typed out. And unlike the work you’re actually good at, there’s no clear right answer, so it’s easy to postpone in favor of something with a deadline attached.
So it sits. And the project sits with it, because nobody can design a page around words that don’t exist yet.
What to write before anyone starts
In the order it gets used, which is not the order you’d think of it.
Your one-line answer to “what do you do.” Not your mission. The sentence you’d say to a stranger at a barbecue who then understands. Write it badly, then cut it in half.
Your services, one paragraph each. What it is, who it’s for, what happens when someone hires you for it. Three or four sentences. If you offer twelve things, list the five that pay the bills and leave the rest.
Your service area, specifically. The cities and neighborhoods, not “greater Los Angeles.” This one is quick and it feeds your location pages, which is often where the searches actually land.
The five questions you answer on every call. Do you charge for estimates, how soon can you come, do you handle permits. These become your FAQ and they remove the friction that stops people calling.
Three sentences about why you, specifically. Not “quality and integrity.” The actual reason your customers pick you. If you don’t know, ask two of them.
That’s it. Maybe two hours of writing, and it unblocks the entire project.
Write it badly and on purpose. The single biggest cause of these two hours turning into two months is trying to produce finished prose. You are producing raw material for someone who does this professionally, and a rough, honest paragraph is more useful to them than a polished one that sounds like a brochure.
Want a second opinion on this?
Book a free consultationWhat to do if you genuinely can’t
Some people can’t, and that’s a real answer rather than a failure.
Hire the copywriting. On our builds it’s what separates the entry tier from the middle one, and the reason it’s priced in rather than optional is exactly this problem. Someone interviews you, listens to how you describe the work in your own words, and writes it better than you would have.
Or record yourself instead of writing. Talk through the five items above into your phone as if explaining to a customer, then hand over the recording. Most of the work is in knowing the answers, not typing them.
What doesn’t work is copying a competitor. You end up sounding like everyone else in your category, which is the problem the site was meant to solve. It’s also how sites end up saying nothing, which is what why minimalist, conversion-focused design wins is really arguing against.
What also doesn’t work is waiting until you have time. The job that would free up the afternoon does not arrive. If two hours is genuinely not available this month, that is a real answer, and it points at paying for the copywriting rather than at delaying the build again.
The part that pays off later
Everything on that list is reusable. Your services paragraphs become your ad copy. Your FAQ becomes your Google Business Profile answers. Your service area becomes your location pages. Your one-liner becomes your email signature and your proposal intro.
You’re not writing website content. You’re writing down what your business says, once, in a form you can use everywhere. And if someone has told you the site needs rebuilding, check the words before you agree, because a rebuild does not write them: when a site needs a rebuild and when it needs three fixes.
If a build is stalled and you’re not sure why, check whether the words arrived. It’s almost always the words.
Frequently asked questions
Can the designer just write placeholder text and we fix it later?
It’s done, and it’s how sites launch with words nobody stands behind. Layout decisions get made around fake content, and “fix it later” competes with everything else in your week.
How much do I actually need to write?
For a five-page site, a couple of pages of plain text. It’s less than it feels like from the outside.
What if my services change often?
Write the stable parts. The description of what you do changes far less than the list of what you’re currently offering.
Is it worth paying someone else to write it?
If two hours of writing has been on your list for a month, yes. The cost of the delay usually exceeds the cost of the copywriting.
