A website of up to five pages takes us 2–4 weeks. A website of up to ten pages with a blog takes 4–6 weeks. Those ranges are in the quote before the project starts, and they hold in the great majority of cases.
The more useful question is what sits behind them: what decides whether it becomes two weeks or four? The answer surprises most clients, because it is not on our side of the table. The schedule is almost never limited by design or development. It is limited by how quickly content and approvals come out of the business.
Why the schedule rarely depends on the technology
Building a website is by now the most predictable part of the project. Structure, design and implementation are work that can be estimated, because all of it sits with us. If we say a home page will be standing in a week, it will be standing in a week.
Things become unpredictable at the handover points. Nobody can write a page about your services without you, because only you know what you offer, who it is for, and why someone should hire you rather than the business next door. Nobody can invent a team photo. And a design that three people comment on independently stops being a design after the third round of feedback and becomes a compromise between three opinions.
You can put numbers on this without inventing a statistic. A project with two rounds of feedback at two working days each is finished in four weeks. The same project with two rounds at ten working days each takes eight. The build took exactly the same amount of time in both cases.
The four things that most often hold a schedule together or tear it apart are always the same:
- Copy — who writes it and by when. By far the biggest factor
- Images and logo — at a usable resolution, the logo ideally as a vector file
- Access — to the domain, the hosting and the mailboxes, often still held by a previous supplier
- Approval — one person who is allowed to decide without asking someone else first
The process, week by week
This is what a project of up to five pages looks like from the inside. The right-hand column is the important one: it shows what is needed from you in each week so that the following week can happen at all.
| Period | What happens on our side | What we need from you |
|---|---|---|
| Week 0 — before the start | Free first consultation, scope agreed, fixed price and date in the quote | A decision on who approves. Track down access to the domain and hosting |
| Week 1 — structure | Page structure and running order, first draft of the home page | Copy and images for the home page, logo as a vector file, company details for the imprint |
| Week 2 — design | Home page fully designed, sub-pages set up, the design grid is settled | One consolidated round of feedback on the home page, ideally within two working days |
| Week 3 — build | All pages built, contact form, load time, mobile view, search engine groundwork | The remaining copy, details for the imprint and the privacy policy |
| Week 4 — sign-off and go-live | Revision round, testing on real devices, the switch-over, handover of all logins | Sign-off from one person and a time window for the switch-over |
Two points here need explaining. Week 0 appears in almost no quote but costs real time — in our experience a few days to two weeks pass between the first conversation and the project start, spent finding logins and settling decisions internally. Count that time backwards from your target date, not forwards.
And the revision round in week 4 is one round, not an unlimited number. Two rounds are normal and are planned for; five rounds are a sign that something was left unresolved in week 1. Pinning down the structure early saves the reworking at the end, which is where it is most expensive, because every change then has to travel through every page.
What you can prepare before the start
If you want to actively shorten the schedule, you can — but not during the project. Before it. The list below is ordered by effect. Anyone who has done the first three points before kick-off loses practically no time during the project itself:
- Decide who approves. One person with the authority to decide, not a committee. Everyone else can read along and contribute, but the feedback goes out consolidated, from one address
- Write three to five bullet points for every planned page. This is not finished copy and is not meant to be — it is the material that copy gets made from. A blank page costs two weeks; five bullet points cost twenty minutes
- Find the logins: where the domain is registered, who has the hosting password, where the mailboxes run. This is the item that most often costs a full week, because the previous supplier does not reply
- Gather your photos in one place. Team, premises, work, products — at the highest resolution you have, not the version that has been through a messaging app
- Get hold of the logo as a vector file (an svg, ai or eps). A logo pulled as a small image out of an old slide deck cannot be scaled cleanly and otherwise has to be redrawn
- Settle the details for the imprint: full legal name of the business, a physical address for service, legal form, and where applicable the register entry and VAT identification number
- Note which tools are meant to be embedded: appointment booking, newsletter, reviews, maps. Each one raises a data protection question that is better settled before the build than after
- List the addresses of your existing pages, if a website already exists. Every relaunch needs that list, and it cannot be reconstructed once the switch-over has happened
Clients who arrive at the first consultation with these eight points get more than a faster project — they get a more precise quote, because the scope is then known rather than estimated.
What legitimately makes a project take longer
Not every extension is dithering. There are reasons where more time is the right answer, and it helps to know them in advance rather than discover them halfway through.
An online shop
A shop is not a bigger website; it is a different kind of project. Product data, variants, shipping rules, payment providers, tax rates, returns and the legal texts that go with them all arrive on top of everything an ordinary website needs anyway. The bottleneck is almost always the product data: two hundred items with a description, an image and a price is a working week of its own, and it is your working week. Projects like this run to an agreed plan rather than a package.
Two or more languages
A second language does not double the build time, but it does double the amount of copy and the number of approvals. If the translation is only commissioned once the German site is finished, the project then hangs on an external supplier — which quickly becomes two extra weeks that nobody had planned for.
Many approvers
The single most expensive factor, and the only one that can be solved purely by organisation. With one person, an approval takes a day. With four people it takes as long as the slowest diary, and the feedback that comes back is often contradictory and has to be resolved internally before anyone can change anything at all.
Waiting on third parties
A photographer whose next slot is in three weeks. A lawyer reviewing the legal texts. An accountant confirming the VAT details. A previous supplier who has to release the domain. These dates sit outside the project but belong in the schedule — at the beginning, not as a surprise in week 3.
What is not a legitimate delay, incidentally: an agency that does not get back to you. If you hear nothing for a week, that is not a project risk, it is a supplier problem. Before you commission anyone, ask who your contact is and how often you will hear from them.
What “finished” actually means
Launch is the day the website becomes reachable. It is not the day it is finished, and that distinction is not pedantry — it is the reason for most of the disappointment that follows a project.
On launch day a new website starts from zero recognition in the search engines. It has to be found, crawled and classified, and that takes weeks rather than hours. Rankings cannot be promised along the way — anyone who commits to a position by a given date is selling something nobody can deliver. What you should be given instead is access to Google Search Console, so you can see for yourself what is happening.
Just as important: a website that goes live on time with placeholder text costs more than one that goes live complete two weeks later. The reason is uncomfortably mundane. The placeholder does not get replaced once the project counts as closed — it is still there six months later, being crawled by search engines and read by prospects in the meantime. You do not pay for it in project days. You pay for it in enquiries you never receive.
The actual checks immediately before the switch-over — redirects, measurement, legal texts, a contact form that has genuinely been submitted once — are a topic of their own and live in our relaunch checklist.
Why a realistic date is cheaper than hitting an unrealistic one
This is the most honest sentence we have on the subject: a launch date set too tightly is the most common reason a website project turns out badly. Not a lack of skill, not the wrong system, not the budget.
The mechanism is the same every time. Once the date is fixed and time gets short, nothing is saved on the date — it is saved on everything else. First on the copy, because placeholders are the quickest thing to write. Then on testing on real devices, because everything works fine in the office. Then on redirects for the old addresses, because nobody sees those. And last on the measurement, which will be “sorted out after launch” and then is not.
Every one of those items costs more later than it would have cost inside the project. Which is why the most useful question before a project is not “can it be done by the fifteenth?” but “what gets dropped so that it can be done by the fifteenth?”. If you do not get a clear answer, something gets dropped anyway — you just find out later what it was.
Common questions about how long a website takes
Up to five pages: 2–4 weeks. Up to ten pages with a blog: 4–6 weeks. Where you land inside those ranges is decided almost entirely by how quickly copy, images and approvals come from your side. Larger undertakings such as an online shop run to an individually agreed plan.
Technically yes, if all the copy and images exist in full on day one, there are only a few pages, and exactly one person approves. In practice that starting position is rare. We will tell you openly at the first consultation whether your case qualifies, rather than agreeing to a date that could only be met with placeholders.
Missing copy, by a wide margin. Second comes access to the domain and hosting, held by a previous supplier who does not answer enquiries. Third comes approvals that have to pass through several people. All three can be dealt with before the project even starts.
Home page copy is needed in week 1, the rest by week 3. It does not have to be publication-ready — three to five bullet points per page are enough as a basis, and we write it out from there. What does not work is a blank page with no indication of what should be on it.
Say so in the first consultation. We then plan the scope around the date: a complete but smaller website goes live on the day, and the remaining pages follow afterwards. That is the only way to hold a hard deadline without substituting placeholders for quality.
The website is reachable, but search engines still need weeks afterwards to crawl and classify it. Positions cannot be promised and cannot be scheduled. You receive the website, all logins, and access to Google Search Console so that you can follow that development yourself.
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