How long does it take to build a website
Realistic timelines by project type, what actually drives the schedule, and why most website projects slip.
A simple landing page takes one to two weeks. A custom-designed marketing site of five to ten pages takes four to eight weeks. A content-heavy site with a real CMS takes eight to twelve weeks. An e-commerce store takes eight to sixteen weeks, and a fully custom build with complex functionality takes three to six months or more. Most projects that slip do so because of the client side, not the studio side.
The honest answer to how long a website takes is that the design and development are rarely the bottleneck. Content, decisions, and feedback are. A studio can move fast. A project moves at the speed of the slowest approval in the room. Here is what to actually expect.
Landing page: one to two weeks
A single focused page, custom designed, built and launched. This is the fastest thing worth paying for. The timeline is short because the scope is contained: one message, one design, one build. If you have your copy and assets ready, a good studio ships this inside two weeks comfortably.
Marketing site: four to eight weeks
Five to ten pages, custom designed, no complex functionality. This is the most common studio project and the timeline is driven by two things: how many design rounds you need, and how quickly content arrives. Four weeks is achievable when the client is decisive and content is ready. Eight weeks is normal when feedback is slower or the brand work is being figured out along the way.
CMS-driven site: eight to twelve weeks
A marketing site plus a real content management system, so a non-technical team can publish and edit. The extra time over a static marketing site goes into architecting the CMS properly: content models, editor experience, templates that hold up as content grows. This is worth doing carefully, because a badly structured CMS is painful for years.
E-commerce: eight to sixteen weeks
A real store with products, payments, and a checkout. Timeline depends heavily on catalogue size, how custom the shopping experience is, and how many integrations are involved (inventory, shipping, CRM, email). A simple Shopify store lands near the fast end. A bespoke commerce experience with custom functionality lands near the slow end.
Custom build: three to six months or more
A custom application, a site that is really a product, complex functionality, authentication, integrations, custom backend. At this point the website is software, and it takes as long as software takes. The timeline is driven by scope and complexity, not by design, and the honest range is wide because these projects vary enormously.
What actually drives the timeline
Three things move the schedule far more than the studio's speed:
Content readiness. The single most common cause of delay. If copy, images, and assets are not ready when the studio needs them, the project waits. Studios can design around placeholder content, but launch waits for the real thing.
Decision speed. A project with one clear decision-maker moves fast. A project where five people need to agree on every choice moves at the speed of scheduling those five people. This is the difference nobody prices in.
Feedback quality. Vague feedback ("make it pop") causes rounds of guessing. Specific feedback ("the hero headline should lead with the outcome, not the feature") resolves in one pass. How you give feedback affects the timeline as much as how fast you give it.
Why projects slip
Almost every website project that runs late runs late for the same handful of reasons, and almost all of them are on the client side: content that never quite gets finished, decisions that keep getting revisited, new requirements added mid-project (scope creep), and approval chains that were never mapped at the start. A good studio flags these risks in the proposal. A good client takes them seriously.
How to move faster
If you want the fast end of every range: have your content ready before the project starts, name one decision-maker who can approve without a committee, give specific feedback in agreed rounds rather than a trickle, and resist adding new requirements mid-build. A decisive client with ready content is the single biggest accelerator available, and it costs nothing.
See also: How to write a website brief, The full cost of building a website, How to choose a web design studio in 2026.