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How long a website takes — real timelines and what breaks them

27 August 20266 min read

A landing page takes five working days, a business-card site ten, a corporate site eighteen. Those are working timelines and they hold. Calendar time is usually longer, and below is an honest account of where the difference goes.

In short

Landing page 5 working days, brochure site 10, corporate site 18. The count starts the day the structure is approved and the text and photos are in.

What breaks a deadline is not the build — it is waiting for materials. Rush work is possible at +30%.

Working days, not calendar days

Every timeline below is in working days, counted not from the word “agreed” but from the later of two moments: the first payment arriving and your materials arriving. That matters: if payment lands on Monday and the photos come a week later, the clock starts with the photos.

Type of siteWorking daysCalendar, realistically
Landing page57–10 days
Business-card site, up to 5 pages102–3 weeks
Corporate site, up to 10 pages184–5 weeks
Redesign of an existing site2–4 weeksfrom a month
Audit without development5a week

The gap between the columns is not padding “just in case”. It is weekends, your sign-offs and pauses for answers. We cannot work faster than you can look and say yes.

What the timeline is made of

Seven stages, and half of them depend on you more than on us.

StageHow longWho leads
Conversation40 mintogether
Queries and structure1–2 daysus, you confirm
Design3–7 daysus, you sign off
Build3–10 daysus
Filling in1–3 daysyour copy and photos
Launch1 daytogether
Indexing1 dayus

Four things that break a timeline

No content. The most common reason by a wide margin. Copy, photos, a logo and company details are needed before the build, not after. Without them we put in placeholders and carry on, but the clock stops meanwhile: waiting does not count as work.

Late answers. A design sitting in review for five days adds exactly five days. Nothing on our side can speed that up.

Changing the concept after the design is signed off. That is not an edit, it is new work, and we say so plainly. Which is why the design is signed off in writing on the mock-up, before any code: there a rework costs minutes, in a built site it costs days.

Missing access. A domain on a former employee’s email, hosting “somewhere at a friend’s” — that alone can take a week. This is why we ask you to check your access on the first call.

The clock stops while we wait on you and starts again when the answer arrives. That keeps the timeline honest for both sides.

What can be sped up and what cannot

Preparation can: with copy, photos and the list of pages ready before the first call, a landing page genuinely takes five days without a single hour of overtime.

Design cannot: a mock-up made overnight is the one you end up redoing. Nor can indexing — Google crawls a new site at its own pace, over weeks. Being found by your own name happens quickly; being found for service queries takes months, and no timeline changes that.

About urgency

If a date really is burning, say so on the first call rather than after the start. Sometimes it can be met by reordering the stages: build the screen needed for the event first and finish the rest afterwards. That costs nothing and often saves the day.

We do not promise what cannot be done. A five-page site in three days is either not five pages or not three days.

What you hold at the end of each stage

A timeline is verified by what you have in hand, not by words. After the structure — a site map with a page for every query. After the build — a working preview on a temporary address you can open on your phone and show to anyone. After launch — the site on your domain and a test enquiry that went through while you watched.

If at some stage there is nothing to show, the timeline has already slipped — and you find out then, not on handover day.

What to read next

What each timeline includes — in the price grid.

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