How Long Should a Business Website Take to Build?

Ask five agencies how long a website takes and you will get five answers, all of them confident and most of them wrong. The honest answer is that development is rarely the bottleneck.

Where the time actually goes

On a typical marketing site of ten to fifteen pages, the build itself is a few weeks. What stretches a project from eight weeks to eight months is almost always one of three things.

1. Content that does not exist yet

Design can be signed off with placeholder text. A site cannot launch on it. If nobody has been made responsible for writing the About page, it will not get written, and the project will wait.

2. Approval with no defined end

Revision rounds that are not numbered do not end. Agree upfront how many there are and who has the final say. Two named people deciding is faster than six people commenting.

3. Scope added quietly

A booking system mentioned in week six is not a small addition. It is a second project. It may well be worth doing — but as phase two, after launch.

A realistic schedule

For a standard marketing site: one to two weeks of discovery, two to three weeks of design, three to four weeks of build, and two weeks of content loading, testing and fixes. Call it eight to ten weeks with content ready.

E-commerce roughly doubles that. Anything integrating with another system depends entirely on how well that system is documented.

How to keep it on track

Name a content owner at kickoff. Write the copy while design is in progress, not after. Limit approval to two people. And treat the launch date as a decision about what ships, not about how fast people can work.