"How long will my website take?" is the second-most-common question every web designer gets (after pricing). The real answer depends on package + your responsiveness — not just the designer.
Phase 1: Discovery (3-7 days) A real designer starts with discovery — interviewing you about your business, customers, competitors, and goals. Not because they need to fill billable hours, but because the work that comes next depends on getting this right. Sites that skip discovery are templates with your logo on them. Sites that start with discovery actually solve your business problem.
Output: a documented brief that specifies positioning, target audience, success metrics, key conversion paths, and content priorities.
Phase 2: Sitemap + wireframes (2-5 days) Before designing anything pretty, the designer maps out which pages exist, what each page does, and the rough structural layout (hero, then services, then proof, then form — that order). Wireframes are intentionally ugly — black and white boxes with placeholder text — so you focus on structure, not colors.
This is the cheapest phase to make changes in. Spending 30 minutes here saves 3 hours of revisions later.
Phase 3: Design mockups (5-14 days) The visual work. High-fidelity mockups in Figma showing exactly how every page will look. Usually delivered in rounds — 2 rounds of revisions per page is standard. (See our hiring guide for what's normal vs. predatory in revision pricing.)
Where things stall: you take 2 weeks to respond with feedback. The agency moves on to other projects. You ping them back. They re-engage in their next available slot. The 5-day phase becomes a 5-week phase. Be responsive.
Phase 4: Content (concurrent — variable) Either you write the copy (free but slow), the agency writes it (faster but adds cost), or you split it. Photography happens here too. This is the most common bottleneck — most small-business owners think writing the homepage will take a Sunday afternoon, then 3 weeks pass.
If your designer doesn't include copy in scope, get a copywriter quote separately. Writing your own service-page copy without copywriting experience is the #1 reason small-business websites disappoint.
Phase 5: Build (5-21 days) Engineering the actual site. Mobile-responsive HTML/CSS. Performance optimization (sub-1s mobile LCP — see our technical SEO playbook). Forms wired to your CRM. SEO foundations: schema markup, sitemap, robots.txt, OG images. Analytics installed.
Productized agencies (like us) ship this phase in 5-7 days because everything is systematized. Custom builds can take 2-3 weeks.
Phase 6: QA + launch (3-7 days) Final review on staging. Test every form, every link, every device. DNS migration to the new server. Post-launch monitoring for the first 72 hours when most issues surface. Then it's live.
Total realistic timelines.
- *Starter package ($499): 5-7 business days from kickoff to launch. Single-page or up-to-3-page site. Limited revisions. - Growth package ($999): 10-14 business days. Up to 7 pages. Standard revisions. - Premium package ($1,999): 3-4 weeks. Unlimited pages. Custom design, advanced features, premium animations. - Typical agency project ($5K-$15K): 6-10 weeks. - Full-service agency build ($25K+):* 3-6 months.
The variable that matters most: you. The single biggest predictor of whether a project finishes on time isn't the agency's speed — it's how quickly the client responds to questions, reviews mockups, and delivers content. We've shipped Starter packages in 3 days when clients were on top of it. We've also had 2-week projects stretch to 2 months because content never arrived.
If you want it done in 7 days, plan to spend 2-3 hours of your own time over those 7 days. If you don't have those hours, book the discovery call and we'll plan a longer timeline that matches your bandwidth — that's better than a missed launch date.
