How long a website actually takes
Four to eight weeks for a custom small business site. The interesting question is what happens in them, and which of it is waiting on you.
Timelines below were checked on 12 August 2026 against published 2026 guides. They describe working time from a signed proposal, not from the first email.
By project type
A single landing page can go live in a day. A custom small business site is usually four to eight weeks, and six to twelve through a larger agency. An online shop runs eight to twenty weeks, because payments, tax rules and product data take longer than anyone expects. A large custom platform is six months and up.
The bands overlap because the labels are loose. "Small business website" covers a five-page brochure site and a fifteen-page site with a booking flow, and those are not the same job.
What the weeks are actually spent on
Here is a typical six-week marketing site, mapped onto the eight stages we run. Note the last bar, which is the one that decides whether the rest holds.
Design and development are about half of it. The rest is deciding what the site needs to do, agreeing a fixed price, checking it on real devices, and the launch itself.
The thing that actually causes delays
It is not design and it is not code. Across published 2026 guides the most common reason a website misses its date is missing content: the words, the photographs, the product details, the staff biographies, the legal text somebody has to approve.
This is worth stating plainly because it is the one part of the schedule the studio cannot fix by working harder. A build that is otherwise finished sits waiting on a folder of photographs. We have had projects ready to launch for a month.
Three things that keep a project on its date:
- Start collecting content in week one, not when the design is approved. It always takes longer than the person providing it expects.
- Name one decision-maker. Feedback gathered from four people with different opinions is not feedback, it is a second design phase.
- Agree what "done" means before starting. This is what the fixed written quote is for. Scope that moves is a schedule that moves.
Can it be faster?
Yes, sometimes. We built the Fato Immobiliare site in under a week. That worked because the scope was clear, the content existed on day one and one person made every decision.
What does not make it faster is starting before the scope is settled. That reliably makes it slower, because work gets built, discarded and built again.
If you have a genuine deadline, an event or a launch, say so in the first conversation. It changes what we propose. Sometimes the right answer is a smaller site now and the rest in a second phase.
What we commit to
A date in the proposal, alongside the fixed price, before any work starts. If the scope changes the date can change, and we will say so at the time rather than at the end.
Prices for each of these shapes are in the cost guide.