A week. Or six months. The gap between those two is real, and it is almost never explained by how long the building takes.
Realistic timelines
- One to two weeks. A focused site of a handful of pages, with your content ready to go and decisions made quickly. Genuinely achievable, and we do it regularly.
- Three to six weeks. The normal case. A bespoke site with a proper strategy stage, some copywriting, and a couple of rounds of feedback.
- Two to four months. Larger sites, custom functionality, integrations, multiple stakeholders, or content that needs writing from scratch.
- Six months or more. Usually a sign that something has gone wrong with the process rather than the project being genuinely enormous.
What actually causes delays
Here is the uncomfortable bit: on stalled projects, the hold-up is usually on the client side, and usually for understandable reasons.
Content
The single biggest cause, by a distance. Design and build finish, and then everyone waits three weeks for the About page copy and photographs of the team. Nobody plans for this because writing your own copy always feels like it will take an evening.
The fix is to start it on day one rather than treating it as the last step, and to be honest early about whether you actually want to write it yourself.
Feedback loops
Two days to review a design is fine. Two weeks, three times over, adds a month and a half. Agree the turnaround up front and hold both sides to it.
Too many opinions
One decision-maker is fast. A committee, especially one assembled late, is not. Decide who signs things off before the project starts.
Scope drift
“While we are at it, could we also…” is how a four-week project becomes a four-month one. Each addition is small, which is precisely why they accumulate unnoticed. Note them, park them, do them after launch.
How to make it fast
- Have your content ready, or agree who is writing it. Worth more than anything else on this list.
- Get your photography sorted early. Real photographs of real work beat stock images and always take longer to arrange than you expect.
- Name one decision-maker. Gather other opinions if you must, but let one person decide.
- Turn feedback around in two days. Consolidated into one message, not seven.
- Launch, then improve. A live site earning enquiries beats a perfect one still in review.
Is fast worse?
Not inherently. A short timeline usually reflects a clear brief, ready content and quick decisions, all of which are signs of a healthy project. What matters is whether the strategy work happened, not how many weeks passed.
Where speed does cost you is when it skips working out what the site has to achieve. That stage is where the value is, and it is the first thing a rushed project drops.
Where we land
We build in as little as a week when the content is ready, and three to six weeks for most bespoke projects. You get a date at the start and we keep to it. See how we work, or tell us what you need and we will give you a realistic timeline for your job.