How long a website really takes, and why the delay is usually not the developer

Everybody asks how long it takes. Few ask how long for whom.

On a typical website project the builder's own work is about 40% of the calendar. The other 60% is waiting — for content, for photos, for approvals, for decisions. Projects that slip almost always slip inside that 60%.

Real timelines by type

Template deployed as-is: 2–3 days. Install, swap logo and colours, load the content you already have, point the domain, enable SSL. That number is real if the content is ready.

Template with modifications: 5–10 days. Add or remove blocks, rework the home page, add a page the template does not have. This is the band our service works in, and the handover date goes in the contract.

Custom design: 4–10 weeks. Broken down: 1–2 weeks agreeing scope and wireframes, 2–3 weeks interface design including revision rounds, 2–4 weeks of build, 1 week of testing and going live.

Custom software: 6 weeks to 6 months. Driven by the number of business workflows, not pages. A quick estimate: count the user roles, multiply by two weeks, add two weeks per external integration. Wide error bars, but rarely the wrong order of magnitude.

Where the weeks actually go

Content — cause number one

The biggest delay on every project at every price.

An ordinary business website needs roughly 15–25 pages of text: about, each service, each product group, policies, FAQs. Nobody writes that for you inside a website price. If you start writing after the build is finished, you have just added three weeks.

The fix: write the content before signing, not after. Rough drafts count. Google Docs counts. Words on a page are progress.

Photography — cause number two

Product photos not yet taken, or taken on a phone in the stockroom under yellow light. The builder can do nothing with those, and will not tell you they are bad once you have sent them.

A shoot covering forty products takes a day and needs scheduling. Book it in week one of the project, not the last week.

Approvals — cause number three

Every review round is a wait, and it waits on your calendar. If you answer email after four days, three rounds is twelve days of nothing happening.

The fix: name one person with the final say. A project where three people each have a view on the button colour runs 50% longer than one with a single decision-maker.

The hanging decision — the quiet one

"Let me think more about whether we sell online." That sentence can suspend a project for three weeks, and it appears on no schedule.

The two things that decide whether you ship on time

One: content finished before the build starts. The largest variable, and entirely within your control.

Two: a single approver who replies within 24 hours. No faster is needed, but it must be consistent.

Those two matter more than anything the builder controls. We have shipped sites in five days and seen identically scoped projects take four months — the difference was those two lines, not the code.

Why we put a date in the contract

Because scope is fixed up front and the foundation already exists. Starting from a template already running in production removes the uncertainty — the interface exists, the speed is measured, the admin area works. What remains is your content and the listed modifications.

Our side of the contract states a condition too: content and photos delivered in full before the start date. That is not a way to shift blame — it is the one variable large enough to move a handover date.

One question to ask before signing

"If I send content a week late, how far does the handover date move?"

A shop that answers "a week" has done this many times. A shop that says "no problem" is one that will have an awkward conversation with you next month.