How long it takes to build a website: real timelines

“Can you do it in a week?” We hear that one most weeks. For a landing page, sometimes the answer really is yes. But “a website” covers a lot of ground, from a few days to a few months, and the deciding factor is rarely how fast a designer can move. What sets the pace is the kind of project, whether your text and photos are ready, and how many people on your side have to approve each step.

So here are the numbers we actually plan around. How long each type of site takes, where the weeks go, what tends to drag things out, and what you can safely speed up. No promises of going live by tomorrow, and no scare stories about six months minimum either.

Real timelines by site type

A timeline is always a range. Two landing pages that look identical from the outside can carry very different amounts of text and very different numbers of revision rounds, and that shows up in the schedule. The figures below assume your materials reach us roughly on time:

Site type	Realistic timeline	What eats the time
Landing page	1 to 3 weeks	Copy, number of screens, animation
Corporate / multi-page	4 to 8 weeks	Structure, volume of content, approvals
Catalogue site	4 to 8 weeks	How many items, importing the data
Online store	6 to 12+ weeks	Payments, delivery, stock systems
Redesign	2 to 6 weeks	Audit, moving old content, redirects

Read “realistic” carefully. These ranges cover a prototype, a design built for you rather than pulled off a shelf, a layout that adapts to phones, and the SEO basics that help Google find you. They do not describe a template recoloured in an evening. Not sure which type fits you yet? Start with landing page vs multi-page site, because the format you pick sets the timeline more than anything else.

Where the time goes: the stages

Once you see where the weeks land inside a project, the whole range makes more sense. Roughly, the split goes like this:

1. Brief and structure (10 to 20%). We figure out what the site is for, who it speaks to, and why. Skip this and you don’t save time. You just pay it back later in rework. There’s more on this in what a brief and a spec are.
2. Prototype and design (25 to 35%). The screen logic comes first, the look second. Most of the back-and-forth on your side happens here.
3. Build (30 to 40%). The design turns into a real site that works on any screen, and the forms and integrations get wired up.
4. Content, testing and launch (15 to 20%). Filling pages with your material, checking it on phones and tablets, tuning speed, laying the SEO groundwork, moving it onto your domain.

Website development stages walks through all of this in detail. One thing matters more than the percentages, though: these stages overlap. While you’re still approving the second screen, we’re already building the first. That overlap is how a schedule shrinks without anything being skipped.

What actually slips the deadline

Deadlines rarely break because the code got hard. They break on the human side of the project. Content is the big one. “I’ll send the copy and photos tomorrow” has a way of becoming a month of waiting, and a design with placeholder text in it is a mockup, not a site you can launch.

Approvals are the next culprit. When three people share the decision and they only meet on Fridays, a single round of edits quietly costs a week. Then there’s scope. Halfway through, someone says “while we’re at it, let’s add a blog, a catalogue, and a second language.” That isn’t a tweak, it’s a second project, and it carries its own timeline.

Outside systems can hold things up too. Payments, your CRM, delivery: these depend on documentation and login details that the studio can’t create on its own, so we wait on whoever can.

The costliest delay on a project usually costs the studio nothing. It’s the week we spend waiting for your copy, while the code that depends on it sits finished.

How to compress the schedule without cutting corners

You shorten a timeline by closing the idle gaps, not by cutting stages out. A few things make the biggest difference.

Start gathering your copy and photos the moment the structure is signed off. Don’t file it under later. This one habit saves more time than anything else here. Then pick one person on your side who can give the final yes, so feedback gets collected and decided in one place instead of circling a committee. And settle the scope before we begin: a clear brief and spec keeps “let’s also add” from creeping in week after week.

Two more help. Launch something small first. A strong landing page live now, earning leads, beats a complete site that’s still three months away. And get the keys to us early: domain, hosting, analytics, payment accounts. Pulling those together takes a surprising amount of chasing, so do it while the design is still in progress.

This is why a tight deadline often points us back to that landing page. It’s realistic to have one live in one to three weeks, it starts from €649, and it brings in enquiries while the rest of the site catches up.

When “fast” means “expensive”

Money buys time, but only up to a point. A rush means the team sets other work aside and runs your project on priority, and that costs more on both sides. You see it even in our support rates: a standard hour is €60, an urgent one €90. And throwing twice the people at a landing page won’t halve the time. Some steps simply have to follow one another, and approvals still move at the speed your side can manage.

So be clear-eyed about a “needed it yesterday” date. When the timeline genuinely doesn’t fit, one of two things happens: quality gets sacrificed (a template, no SEO, half-finished text), or the date slips anyway. The difference is whether someone tells you up front or three days before launch.

Got a date the site has to be live by? Describe the project and the deadline in a few lines. We’ll tell you plainly whether it’s doable, then map out a stage-by-stage schedule that shows which parts sit with us and which sit with you.