A small business website takes four to six weeks. A larger marketing site with real content work takes eight to twelve. A custom product site with integrations takes three months or more. Those are the honest ranges, and almost nobody misses them because the design took longer than expected. Projects slip because decisions and content arrive late, and the design work sits waiting.
That distinction matters when you are planning a launch around a conference, a funding round or a rebrand. The part you are buying is fairly predictable. The part you own is the part that moves.
The short answer, by project size
These are working timelines from a decided brief to a live site, assuming one designer and a client who can give feedback within a couple of days. They are calendar weeks, not billable hours.
| Project | Design | Build | Realistic total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Landing page, one screen | 3 to 5 days | 3 to 5 days | 1.5 to 2 weeks |
| Small business site, 5 to 8 pages | 1.5 to 2 weeks | 2 weeks | 4 to 6 weeks |
| Marketing site, 10 to 20 pages | 3 to 4 weeks | 3 to 4 weeks | 8 to 12 weeks |
| Site with a booking, portal or shop | 4 to 6 weeks | 6 weeks+ | 3 to 5 months |
| Redesign of an existing site | 2 to 4 weeks | 3 to 4 weeks | 6 to 10 weeks |
The totals are longer than design plus build in every row, and that gap is not padding. It is the time between phases: the days waiting on feedback, the week the copy did not arrive, the round where two people in your company disagreed about the homepage. Anyone quoting you a total that exactly equals their own working days is quoting their availability, not your launch date.
Where the weeks actually go
Before design starts: 3 days to 2 weeks
Brief, goals, sitemap, and an audit of whatever exists today. On a redesign this is also where URLs and redirects get planned, which is the step that protects your search rankings and the one most often skipped. I broke down that part in full in the website redesign checklist.
Projects that skip this phase do not save the time. They spend it later, one confused decision at a time, while a designer waits for an answer.
Design: 1 to 6 weeks
Usually the homepage first, since it settles the visual direction, then the rest of the templates once that is agreed. Two rounds of revisions is standard. The reason this range is so wide is not aesthetics, it is how many genuinely different page types exist. Twelve pages built from four templates is a much smaller job than eight pages that are all different problems.
Build: 1 week to several months
A brochure site on a well-understood stack is quick and predictable. Anything involving payments, bookings, logins, or syncing with a system you already run is a different category of work, because the failure modes multiply and every one needs testing. If a quote treats “and connect it to our CRM” as a line item rather than a phase, ask more questions.
Content, QA and launch: 1 to 2 weeks
Real copy in place, images sized and compressed, forms tested, analytics wired, redirects live, and someone watching the site for the first couple of days. This phase gets compressed to nothing when the project runs late, which is exactly when it is most needed.
The four things that actually cause slippage
1. Content that does not exist yet
This is the biggest one by a distance. Design can start on placeholder copy, but it cannot finish on it, and a site cannot launch on it. If nobody has been given the job of writing the words, that job silently becomes the designer’s, or it becomes the reason you are three weeks late.
The fix is unglamorous: decide who writes each page and when, before design starts, and treat that deadline as seriously as the design deadline. If the answer is “the designer will handle it”, price it and schedule it, because it is real work either way.
2. Sign-off by committee
Feedback from four people who do not agree with each other is not feedback, it is homework for the client. Every project I have seen run long had more than one decision maker and no named tiebreaker. Name one person who has the final word on visual direction and one who has it on copy, before the first mockup rather than during round four.
3. Scope that grows mid-flight
“While we are in here, can we also add a blog?” Each of these is small on its own and reasonable in isolation. Three of them is a fortnight. A change request process is not bureaucracy, it is how you find out what an addition costs in time before you agree to it.
4. Third parties on their own schedule
Domain transfers, hosting migrations, a payment provider’s verification process, a legal review, brand assets from another agency, an API key from an internal team. None of these are the designer’s work and all of them can hold a launch. List them at kickoff and start the slow ones immediately, because the sequencing is what hurts, not the work itself.
What genuinely speeds a project up
Some things compress a timeline. Others just move the cost somewhere less visible.
Things that work: having final copy ready before design begins, one decision maker per decision type, a shorter sitemap rather than a faster designer, reusing a template family rather than designing every page uniquely, and booking feedback sessions in advance so a review does not wait a week for a calendar slot.
Things that do not: adding a second designer to a small project, which usually adds coordination rather than speed. Skipping the discovery phase. Compressing QA. Asking for the build to start before the design is agreed, which reliably produces work that gets built twice.
The other honest lever is who you hire. A designer who also builds removes the entire handoff phase, which on a small site is a week of translation and back and forth. That trade-off, and when a team beats one person, is the subject of freelance versus agency web design, and the money side sits in what a custom website costs.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a website take to build if I have everything ready?
With final copy, images, brand assets and one decision maker in place, a five to eight page business site can go from kickoff to live in about three weeks. That is genuinely the floor for work that is considered rather than rushed, and very few projects arrive that prepared.
Can a website be built in a week?
A single landing page, yes, if the content exists and the scope is one screen. A full site in a week means a template with your logo dropped into it, which is a legitimate product at a much lower price, but it is not a designed site and it will not do anything a template cannot.
Why do agencies quote longer timelines than freelancers?
Partly process, since work moves through more hands and each handover has a queue, and partly honesty about capacity, because your project shares a schedule with others. The upside is that an agency timeline usually survives one person getting sick, where a freelancer’s does not.
What happens if the project runs late?
Find out early who absorbs it. A good contract has milestone dates on both sides, including yours for content and feedback, so a delay has a visible cause rather than becoming a general argument at the end. Most overruns I have seen trace back to a date the client missed, which is much easier to discuss when it was written down.
Should I set a hard launch date?
Yes, but tie it to something real and work backwards, adding a buffer week before it. A date attached to an event gets decisions made. A date attached to nothing gets moved, and everything drifts to fill the space.
How long does a website redesign take?
Six to ten weeks for a business site, assuming the content mostly survives. A redesign carries work a new build does not: auditing what exists, deciding what to keep, and mapping every ranking URL to a destination so search traffic survives the move. That mapping is the step teams skip and then pay for, and it is the first thing in the redesign checklist.
How fast can a website be built, realistically?
A single landing page in two or three days if the copy exists. A five page site in about three weeks with everything ready and one decision maker. Anything faster than that is a template with your logo dropped in, which is a legitimate product at a much lower price, but it is not a designed site.
How long does it take to update an existing website?
Copy and image changes are same-day. A new page on existing templates is one to three days. A new section that needs its own layout is one to two weeks including design. The jump in effort comes when a change needs a new template rather than new content, so it is worth asking which one you are requesting.
How long does it take to design a website, as opposed to build it?
Design alone is one and a half to four weeks for most business sites, and it is the smaller half. The table above splits design from build for exactly this reason: teams often budget for the design phase and are surprised by the calendar time that content, decisions and QA consume around it.
How long does an MVP or product surface take, rather than a website?
Different work and a different clock. A defined product workflow is three to five weeks of design, and a multi-role product surface runs considerably longer, because the effort sits in states and edge cases rather than pages. I set out what that involves in B2B product design.
Planning a build
If you have a date in mind and want a sanity check on whether it is realistic before you commit to it, send me the scope. I am a UI/UX and web designer working with clients in the US, Australia and Asia, and I would rather tell you a timeline is tight at the start than discover it together in week six. You can see the kind of work and scale I take on in my case studies.
Planning a website or product design project?