how long does a website take to build?

A five-page business site takes three to six weeks from kickoff to launch. The build takes about a week of that. The rest is content, decisions and review, which is also where almost every overrun comes from.

That pattern holds across project sizes. Below are typical ranges by project type, what the weeks are spent on, and the specific causes of delay worth planning around. These are ranges rather than promises; a timeline depends on scope, on how fast decisions get made, and on who is writing the words.

Typical timelines by project type

Brochure site, 4–8 pages: 3–6 weeks. Discovery and sitemap in week one, design in weeks two and three, build in week four, content population and review in week five, launch. Can compress to two weeks with final copy in hand and a single decision-maker. Stretches past two months when copy is written as the project goes.

Local service site with location pages and blog, 10–25 pages: 6–12 weeks. Same early phases, then a longer content phase because fifteen genuinely distinct pages have to be written. If location pages are part of the plan, the writing is the schedule. Thin duplicated pages are faster and do not work, which we go into in our Ottawa local SEO guide.

Bilingual site: add 3–6 weeks to the equivalent unilingual timeline. Translation, review of the translation, and a second pass over every form, email and error message. The technical portion adds days; the content portion adds weeks. Details in our post on bilingual sites for Ottawa–Gatineau.

Online store: 6–16 weeks. Catalogue preparation drives this more than anything. Fifty products with written descriptions, specifications, variants and photographed images is a bigger job than it sounds, and it usually sits with the client. Payment, shipping rules, tax configuration and test orders add one to two weeks of their own.

Custom web application, first version: 3–8 months. User accounts, data that changes, business rules, integrations. These run in iterations with working software to look at every two or three weeks. A first release in under three months usually means the scope was smaller than "application" implies.

Redesign of an existing site with content migrated: 6–14 weeks. The extra time over a new build goes into the URL inventory, the redirect map and verification after launch. Skipping that is how a redesign loses traffic.

Accessibility remediation on a live site: 2–8 weeks. Entirely dependent on how the original was built. Semantic markup is quick to fix; a site assembled from images and nested divs sometimes takes longer to patch than to rebuild.

Where the weeks actually go

For a typical small business site, the split looks roughly like this.

Discovery and planning, 3–7 days. What the site has to accomplish, who it is for, the sitemap, the technical decisions. Skipping this does not save time; it relocates the time into rework later.

Content, 1–4 weeks, often in parallel. Copy, photography, logos, staff bios, service descriptions, legal pages. This is the longest single phase on most projects and the one least often scheduled.

Design, 1–3 weeks. Key page layouts, the component set, mobile layouts. Two rounds of feedback is normal; five means the brief was unclear.

Build, 1–3 weeks for a brochure site. Faster than clients expect, which is why "how long does the development take" is the wrong question.

Content population and review, 1–2 weeks. Everything loaded, every page read, every form tested, every link clicked.

Pre-launch checks, 2–5 days. Performance, accessibility, cross-browser, mobile, analytics, redirects, 404s, certificates, sitemap, Search Console. Our website launch checklist has the full list.

Launch day and the week after. DNS propagation, monitoring, the small fixes that only appear under real traffic.

The five real causes of delay

1. Content. By a wide margin the most common. The site is built and sits waiting for the about page, the team photos, or the service descriptions. The fix is to decide at kickoff who writes each page, with a date per page, and to treat a missed content date as a schedule change rather than something to absorb.

2. Too many decision-makers, or an absent one. Four people with equal say and no tiebreaker produces contradictory feedback and a design that satisfies nobody. One named approver, with others consulted, cuts weeks off a project.

3. Scope added mid-build. "Can we also add a booking system" is a reasonable question and a different project. Adding it mid-stream pushes the launch. Agreeing to park it for phase two is usually the better trade, and it keeps the launch date real.

4. Third parties. A payment processor approving an account, a host migrating something, a franchise head office approving brand usage, a translator, a photographer, a lawyer reviewing a privacy policy. None are under the developer's control and all belong in the schedule.

5. Feedback latency. Three review rounds at three days each finishes a week earlier than three rounds at a week each. The one factor entirely within the client's control, and the one most often underestimated.

Two smaller ones: domain and DNS access that nobody can find, and discovering in week five that French or accessibility conformance was always a requirement.

How to make a deadline real

If you have a hard date — a grant deadline, a trade show, a season — work backwards from it with these rules.

Put the content deadline three weeks before launch, not one. Content arriving late is the default failure mode, so give it slack.

Agree what gets cut. Before the project starts, name the pages or features that come out if the schedule tightens. A decision made calmly in week one is better than one made in a panic in week eight.

Launch smaller, sooner. Six strong pages live on the date beats twenty pages two months late. Pages can be added after launch; a missed deadline cannot be un-missed.

Do not launch into a Friday. Or the day before a holiday, or the morning of your busiest week. Launch Tuesday, with people available.

Separate launch from the content programme. The blog, location pages and case studies can be published steadily afterwards. Holding the site back until the content library is complete is how a six-week project becomes a six-month one.

What happens after launch

The site going live is the start of the part that produces results. Search visibility builds over months rather than days: new pages need to be indexed, and position moves slowly. Expect to see impressions in Search Console within a few weeks of indexing and to need a quarter before you can judge anything. The measurement approach is in how to read Google Search Console.

Plan for a small amount of ongoing work: fixes in the first month, content additions after that. A site that is never touched again slowly stops describing the business.

When we scope web development in Ottawa we give a date range with the content dependencies named, because a timeline that assumes content appears on request is a timeline that slips. If you have a deadline you need to hit, tell us the date first and we will tell you honestly what fits inside it.

Common questions

Can a website be built in a week?

Yes, for a small site, with final copy and images ready, one decision-maker, and no custom functionality. The constraint is almost never the build. It is whether everything the build needs already exists.

Why does my developer's estimate seem so long for a simple site?

An honest estimate includes discovery, design rounds, content population, testing and launch checks. An estimate that covers only the build time looks shorter and then overruns. Ask what phases are inside the number.

What can I do right now to speed things up?

Write your content, or hire someone to. Gather photos and logos. Name one approver. Find your domain and DNS logins. Those four tasks remove most of the usual delay before the project starts.

Does a redesign take longer than a new site?

Usually, slightly. The extra work is inventorying the existing URLs, mapping redirects and verifying nothing broke afterwards. That work protects your existing search traffic, which makes it worth the time.

How long until the new site brings in traffic?

Direct and referral traffic arrives immediately. Search traffic builds over months, and for competitive terms a quarter is the earliest point the trend means anything.