Building websites can take a long time. Yes, I know that’s a huge understatement. Of course, building websites can take a long time.

Typically, building a website isn’t a quick thing.

If you are starting from scratch, you have to create the layout and stylesheet, code that PHP, HTML, and CSS. It’s time-consuming.

But, even if you are not starting from scratch, it can be a big process. Finding the right theme as a starting point, customizing and altering that theme, and then tweaking it for the particular project you are working on.

At a minimum, it can take several days to build a simple website.

Over the last several years, website builders have popped up to offer a promising solution: be able to build a website quicker, without having to know how to code.

But, how much quicker can you build a website with a website builder?

With the right builder, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. You can work off of full website templates that are either provided by the platform or ones that you have created. Just like you can create and reuse a theme in WordPress on future projects, with many website builders, you can save your website creation as a template for future projects.

Though, not all site builders are created equal. Some are easier to use than others. And some have better template and site-building features.

But, coming back to the question – how much quicker can you build a website with a website builder?

Well, with one website builder – Offsprout – you can build a website in as little as five minutes.

Don’t believe it? Check this…

The Offsprout Site Grower lets you build out a fully-designed website in just a few minutes.

Think of the Site Grower as a website building wizard.

So, let’s now do a quick run-down of Offsprout, and take a look at this site builder that lets you build a website in as little as 5 minutes.

What is Offsprout?

Offsprout is a WordPress website builder (plugins and theme) that any WordPress user can add to their site, allowing them to quickly and easily build beautiful websites. It was designed with freelancers and agencies in mind, to help them build great-looking websites in a fraction of the time it typically takes to build a website. So much of building websites can be like “reinventing the wheel” where you do the same things you have done before. So, Offsprout was created to eliminate those steps and save time.

What is this 5-Minute Site Grower?

The Site Grower is a website builder wizard that takes you through all of the main pages for your website, helping you choose your color scheme, page layouts, and also insert your content. At the end of the Site Grower process, you have a fully-built website.

One thing to mention ahead of time… sometimes when we start website design projects, we don’t have all the information we need from a client.
Whether it is social media profiles or a logo.

But, with Offsprout and the Site Grower, you can always add information later, and it will populate across your entire website. That is one especially nice feature of Offsprout, that you can set elements across your entire site that affect all of the pages you have created (if you want).

Here are the steps to the Site Grower:

Company Info

The first step in the Site Grower is adding the company information for your client. You’ll be prompted to add the company logo, email, phone, and address.

Offsprout will reference this information throughout the site later. So, when you add your logo or set the business name here, that info will be added to different pages throughout the site.

Don’t worry though if you do not have everything perfect right now. You can easily change your logo or business information later, and it will change across the entire site.

Social Profiles

Next, you will add your social media profile URLs. Whether you have ten or two, you can add all of them in this section. Now, regardless of the location of your social buttons, they will all reference the profiles you linked to in this step.

Remote Template Sites

If you have been using Offsprout for a while, you have probably created templates at some point.

Like we said before – one of the best ways to save time building websites is to rely on your previous work. Do that by using templates of sites and pages, built from websites you have created in the past.

With Offsprout, you can build your own personal template library and call upon that library in the Site Grower.

In this step of the Site Grower, you can hook into either your own personal template library, the Offsprout template library, or both.

Create Your Webpages

Now we’re at the sage in the Site Grower process where you choose the pages for your website, with tons of page templates to choose from.

This section of the Site Grower reminds me of an old-school game show called Supermarket Sweep (this is the part where I make myself feel real old). The show was a gameshow inside of a supermarket. Yeah, it was kind of weird. But, the finale of each show was the contestants running through an empty supermarket, shopping cart in hand, throwing as much of the groceries into their shopping carts as possible, to get the highest total and win the prize.

I haven’t completely lost you yet, have I?

Apparently, this was a long-winded way of saying, “This part is your free-for-all.”

So, this section of the Site Grower is basically a free-for-all – you get to choose all the pages you want for your website, as many as you want.

You can choose from homepage templates and add a homepage.

Choose from product pages and add as many product pages as you want for as many products or services as you have.

Add contact and about pages. Everything.

Throw all those pages into your “cart.”

Once you have your pages chosen, you have the option to duplicate pages within the templates you have chosen. So, if you choose a particular style of product or features page, you can create multiples of that page for all of your products and features pages.

For example, you can use one style of product page to create 5 different product pages.

Delete Content

This next step gives you the option to delete all preexisting pages and posts from your current website if you want to start from scratch.

And that’s all there is to the Site Grower. Now, you essentially have a fully-built website.

Structures

Now it is time to build your site-wide content like headers and footers.

When you click to create a Structure, you can design using a default, or start with Offsprout pre-built templates and customize from there.

The Offsprout templates for Structures will have areas for things like your logo, phone, address, or other company info.

After you build a structure, the company information from the Site Builder will populate into those Structures in the places you set.

Last Touches

Once you’ve built your site-wide areas, your site is more or less finished.

You’ll see that you now have a fully-built website with all the pages you created, with site-wide sections like headers and footers, and your business information populated in all the right places.

So, what is there left to do?

Now you can do things like customize the color scheme across the site, and add more content to your individual pages.

And that’s it.

In as little as five minutes, you’ve built a complete website.

Conclusion

Building websites quickly and effortlessly is a goal for a lot of freelancers, website designers, and agencies. And there are a lot of tools that can help. But, some tools are better than others.

While a lot of builders pitch that they can help you quickly build a website, not all of them can actually do it. Pieces of certain website builders can be pretty disconnected – from issues with global / site-wide areas, to quickly creating new pages from templates, and easily getting in all your project’s content in the right places.

Offsprout is one website building tool that can actually give you a fully-built website in just a few minutes.

You can check out the Offsprout Site Grower video below.