Six to ten weeks is the honest answer for a typical business website, from the first proper conversation to going live. Anyone quoting two weeks is describing a template with your logo dropped into it, and anyone quoting six months is either building something genuinely complex or has no process.
The more useful thing to understand is where that time goes, because most of the delay on most projects is not the building.
Where the weeks actually go
Working out what the site needs to do: one to two weeks
What each page is for, who it is aimed at, what you want a visitor to do, and which pages exist at all. Skipping this is the most expensive shortcut available, because it surfaces as rework in week seven when it is far more painful to fix.
Design: one to two weeks
Fewer weeks than people expect, and it depends heavily on how decisions get made. One person deciding is fast. A committee is not.
Build: two to three weeks
This is the part everybody pictures when they think about a website, and it is rarely the bottleneck. A competent developer with a settled design and finished content moves quickly.
Content: the part that runs over
Text, photographs, staff details, service descriptions, the legal pages. This is where nearly every website project stalls, and it stalls because it is the only stage that depends on the client rather than the agency.
It is also the stage most often assumed to take no time. It takes weeks.
Testing and launch: about a week
Checking it on real devices, checking forms actually deliver, setting up redirects from the old urls, confirming tracking works. Compressing this is how sites launch with a contact form that silently goes nowhere.
The thing that decides your timeline
It is not the developer. It is how fast you can supply content and make decisions.
A project with one decision maker and the text written before the build starts finishes near six weeks. The same project, same developer, same scope, waiting on photos and passing designs around five people takes four months. The difference is entirely on the client side, and it is worth knowing that before you start rather than discovering it in week nine.
If you do one thing to make a rebuild fast, write the content first.
What makes it take longer, legitimately
- Ecommerce, because products, payments, shipping rules and tax all need configuring and testing properly
- Anything with logins, bookings or member areas, where the testing burden is much higher than it looks
- Integration with existing systems such as a CRM or a booking platform, which always uncovers something
- A large site being restructured, where the redirect mapping alone is real work
- Regulated industries, where copy has to be checked against advertising rules before it can go live
None of these are excuses, they are scope. The right response is to hear them at quoting time rather than at week eight.
The two week website
It exists, and sometimes it is the correct choice. A template, your logo, your colours, your text poured in, live by the end of the fortnight.
That is a reasonable answer for a business that needs presence rather than performance, or one testing whether an idea has legs before committing. It is a bad answer for a business whose website is expected to bring in work, because everything that makes a site convert is the part that got skipped.
The trap is being sold the second thing at the price of the first.
The part nobody mentions at quoting time
Launch day is not the end. Redirects from every old url need to be in place, or the rankings you spent years earning land on a 404 page.
We see this constantly on sites that have been rebuilt: the new pages are fine, the old addresses Google still holds go nowhere, and traffic falls off a cliff for reasons nobody can explain. Budget a few days for it, and check it after launch rather than assuming.
A realistic expectation
Six to ten weeks for a normal business site, most of it decided by how quickly you can supply content and make decisions. Longer if there is ecommerce, logins or a system to integrate with. Shorter only if you are accepting a template, which is a legitimate choice as long as you know that is what you are buying. If you want a straight answer for your own site, that is the first conversation in any of our web design work.
