A standard five to eight page small business website usually takes three to six weeks from kickoff to launch. The build itself is rarely the bottleneck. Waiting on content is.
Expect one to two weeks for a landing page, three to six weeks for a standard business site, and eight to sixteen weeks once e commerce or custom functionality is involved. Timelines slip most often because copy, images and approvals arrive late, not because design takes longer than planned.
The stages and what each really costs in time
- Discovery, 2 to 4 days. Goals, audience, sitemap, references. Short but decisive, since everything downstream depends on it.
- Design, 5 to 10 days. Key page layouts first, then the rest once direction is approved.
- Build, 5 to 12 days. Responsive implementation, forms, integrations, performance and accessibility work.
- Content population, 2 to 10 days. Almost entirely dependent on when you supply copy and images.
- Review and launch, 3 to 5 days. Revision rounds, cross device testing, redirects, analytics and go live.
Why projects actually run late
In our experience the single biggest cause of delay is content. A build can be technically finished and still sit unlaunched for three weeks while nobody writes the about page. The second cause is scattered feedback: comments arriving from four people over ten days, sometimes contradicting each other.
How to keep a project on schedule
- Write your copy before design starts, or agree in writing that we will draft it.
- Nominate one decision maker who consolidates all internal feedback.
- Batch revisions into one round rather than sending them as they occur to you.
- Gather logos, photos and brand assets during discovery, not at build stage.
- Confirm hosting and domain access early, since transfers can take days.
What a rushed timeline costs
Sites can be delivered faster, but something is always traded: fewer revision rounds, template based layout, or skipped accessibility and performance work. Where a hard deadline exists, the honest approach is to reduce scope deliberately, launch a strong smaller site, and add pages afterwards.