How long does website development take?

Timelines vary, but not randomly. Once you know the stages and who is responsible for each, you can predict a project fairly accurately — and spot which promises are unrealistic.

Rough ranges by project type

• Single landing page: around one to two weeks, assuming copy and assets are ready.
• Brochure website, up to five pages: roughly three to five weeks.
• Business website, ten to fifteen pages with a CMS: roughly six to nine weeks.
• E-commerce store: roughly eight to fourteen weeks, depending heavily on catalogue size and integrations.
• Custom web application: quoted after a discovery phase, because anything else is a guess.

These assume a single decision-maker on your side and reasonably prompt feedback. Both of those matter more than they sound.

Where the time actually goes

Development is rarely the longest stage. Discovery and planning take one to two weeks. Design usually takes two to three, including review cycles. Development runs three to five weeks for a typical business site. Testing and launch take about a week. Content sits alongside all of it and is the usual bottleneck.

The thing that delays most projects

Content. Not design disagreements, not technical problems — waiting for text, images, product details, team photos and legal approvals. It is the most common reason a six-week project becomes a four-month project.

The fix is unglamorous: agree a content deadline in week one, name one person responsible for it, and start development on the pages whose content is ready rather than waiting for the full set.

How to keep a project on schedule

1. 01Nominate one decision-maker with authority to approve design. Committee feedback doubles review cycles.
2. 02Deliver content in batches as it is ready, not in one final drop.
3. 03Give consolidated feedback within an agreed window rather than in a trickle over two weeks.
4. 04Keep new ideas in a list for phase two instead of adding them mid-build.
5. 05Agree the launch date and its dependencies in writing at the start.