The honest answer is four to six weeks for a straightforward business site, eight to sixteen for anything with real functionality behind it — and that the biggest variable is not the developer.
Here is where the time actually goes, and which parts you control.
The stages, and what each really takes
Discovery and brief: one to two weeks
Deciding what the site is for, who it speaks to, what it must contain and what success looks like. Businesses that skip this stage do not save two weeks — they spend them later, in revisions.
Design: one to three weeks
Layouts for the key page types, not for every page. A well-run design stage produces two or three templates that everything else fits into.
The variable here is approval. One person reviewing takes days. A committee reviewing takes weeks, and often produces a design that satisfies the committee rather than the customer.
Build: two to eight weeks
Turning approved designs into a working site. A brochure site is at the short end. Anything involving a shop, a login, a booking flow or a connection to another system is at the long end, because each of those has to be tested against the ways people get it wrong.
Content: runs alongside, and rarely does
This is the stage that decides your launch date. Written copy, photographs, product details, staff biographies, legal pages. It is usually the client's responsibility and it is usually late.
Testing and launch: one week
Browsers, phones, forms, payments, redirects, analytics, backups. A week is honest. Compressing it is how sites launch with a broken contact form nobody notices for a month.
The three real causes of delay
Content that does not exist yet
Almost every overdue website project is waiting on words. The design is done, the build is done, and there are nine pages of placeholder text because nobody had time to write about the services.
The fix is unglamorous: write the content first, or commission it as part of the project and budget for it properly. A site cannot be finished around content that has not been decided.
Decisions with no owner
If four people must agree on the homepage headline and none of them owns the decision, that headline takes a fortnight. Name one person who can approve, and give them the authority to do it.
Scope that grows mid-build
Adding a booking system in week five does not add a week. It reopens design, changes the build, extends testing and pushes launch. Not because anyone is being difficult — because each of those stages depends on the one before.
A feature discussed in week one costs a conversation. The same feature requested in week six costs a phase.
What genuinely shortens a project
- Have your content ready. Or agree at the outset who is writing it and by when, in the schedule rather than alongside it.
- Give feedback in one pass. Collect every comment, then send them together. Three rounds of consolidated feedback beats twelve emails.
- Decide the must-haves early. Everything else goes on a phase two list, which is a real list rather than a polite refusal.
- Sort the boring things now. Domain access, hosting logins, analytics accounts, payment provider details. These block launch far more often than anyone expects.
Timelines by type of site
Brochure site, five to ten pages. Four to six weeks with content ready. Eight to ten without.
Larger site with a content system and structured sections. Six to ten weeks. The extra time is content modelling — deciding how case studies, services and news are structured so your team can add them later without help.
Online shop. Ten to sixteen weeks, and the product data usually determines it. Three hundred products with variants, images and descriptions is a substantial data project on its own.
Web application or customer portal. Three months and upwards, because the requirements need discovering as much as building. We cover the difference in websites versus web applications.
Why rushing costs more
Compressed projects skip the same three things: the discovery that would have prevented the rework, the content planning that would have prevented the delay, and the testing that would have caught the broken form.
A site launched two weeks early with a payment flow that fails on iPhones has not saved anyone anything.
If you have a fixed date to hit — a trade show, a funding round, a rebrand — say so at the first meeting. Scope can be shaped around a deadline. It cannot be rescued at the end of one.
Our web development team gives dated schedules with the dependencies named, so you can see which parts of the timeline are yours. Discuss your requirements and we will tell you what is realistic.
