How long a company website takes is a question most developers answer with a range, when what a business needs is a calendar. The top results will usually give you a wide span with nothing behind it: not a word about what happens inside those weeks, when a decision is needed from you, or at which point a project starts to slip. A range does not help you plan a season, a domain move, or a campaign that is supposed to start once the site is live.
I have a concrete reference point. The full rebuild of the Złota Faza website took five weeks from the first conversation to going live. That is not a blind promise made to every project, it is one real run that can be broken down into stages. I will use it to show where those weeks actually go, because it is almost never where people expect.
How long a company website takes - the schedule week by week
What follows is a company website of ordinary size: a dozen or so pages, a contact form, a custom design, no store and no integration with somebody else’s system. For each week I say what I am doing and what I need from you while I do it.
Week zero - scope and quote. It starts with your description or the address of your current site. I send back a written scope, a price and a date. This is not a project week yet, but it belongs in the calendar, because everything downstream counts from the moment the offer is accepted. How to prepare that first message so this stage does not stretch into a week of back-and-forth is something I covered separately in the piece on what to send to get a concrete quote.
Week one - structure and wireframe. We settle the page map, the order of sections on the home page, and what each screen has to do. What comes out is a wireframe with no graphics: boxes and placeholder text. It looks plain on purpose, because at this stage it is much easier to disagree. From you I need one thing this week: access to everything that belongs to somebody else. The domain, the current hosting, the ad account, the panel of whatever system the site has to talk to. I request those on day one, because waiting on another company is the only part of the project I have no control over.
Week two - design of the key screens. Home page, one service page, contact. I do not design every screen, only the ones that set the visual language for the rest; the remaining pages are then assembled from parts that already exist. This is where the most expensive decision to reverse gets made, so I ask for feedback in one batch and from the person who decides. Projects drift when a design is reviewed by five people who each write in a different week.
Week three - the build. Templates, the editing panel, phone layouts. This week you see a working demo rather than a screenshot, and you can click through every page. The code sits in your own repository from day one. From my side this is the most predictable stage, because it depends purely on the scope agreed in writing.
Week four - content, technical work, and what Google sees. Loading text and photos, page addresses, structured data, the sitemap, the privacy policy and consent, analytics. If the copy is mine, this week is packed; if it is yours, this is the week that decides whether the date holds. More often than anything else I see a technically finished site waiting on service descriptions.
Week five - testing and going live. Clicking through on phones and browsers, checking forms and anti-spam, redirects from the old addresses, moving the domain, backups. After launch comes thirty days of care included in the price, which is the window where small fixes happen without a separate quote.
Five weeks works because the stages do not queue up behind one another. While the design is being drawn in week two, access requests are already out and the content is being sorted in the background.
What stretches the date (and what of that is on you)
The technical side is rarely the bottleneck. Projects stall in four places, and three of them sit outside my code.
Copy that was supposed to be ready yesterday. This is the number one cause by a wide margin. “We will write the descriptions ourselves, nobody knows the company better” is true and still ends in a month of standing still, because twenty service descriptions get written in the evenings after work. The fix is not chasing people, it is a decision made in week zero: either the copy goes into my scope, or we agree a date and that date becomes part of the schedule rather than a good intention.
Photos at the resolution of a five-year-old phone. A company usually has hundreds of pictures and none that survives the width of a home page. That is not a failure, it is a line item to plan, as long as it lands in week one rather than the week before launch.
Access to other people’s systems. A test account at a supplier, documentation for warehouse software, the panel held by the previous developer. I request them immediately, but the person answering has no reason to hurry. That is why I carve integrations out as their own stage with their own date, instead of pulling them inside the date for the whole site.
A decision spread across people. One decision-maker on your side shortens a project more than any efficiency on mine. Feedback from three people arriving across three different weeks can add as much to a project as a whole build stage.
All four are predictable before anything starts. That is why I ask for a filled-in brief before I put a date on paper, and I set it out point by point in the piece on the brief that sharpens your quote. The points about copy, photos and integrations are not describing the website; they are setting the dates.
It can be faster, but not for free
A website build can be shortened, and I do it regularly, as long as you know what you are paying with.
The cheapest lever is a dull one: cut the scope. Six pages instead of twenty, one design direction instead of three, a second language added after launch rather than alongside it. The site goes live sooner and keeps growing, and you start collecting enquiries instead of waiting for the full set.
The second is a redesign rather than a build from scratch. If the current site has a sensible structure and usable content, swapping the visual layer alone is usually a few working days, and the site stays up throughout and does not drop out of search results. Very often that is the right answer to a question that started out as how long a brand new website takes.
The third costs money directly: copy and photography on my side, commissioned and written into the schedule as separate items. The longest stall disappears and shows up in the quote instead. That is an honest trade of weeks for budget, and it is worth considering when the launch is pinned to a season or a campaign.
What I do not shorten is testing and the redirect stage. Week five looks like the least impressive one and it is the only week whose absence everyone notices later: in the form that never arrives, and in the addresses that dropped out of Google.
Why one quote says three weeks and another says three months
The spread in offers on the market does not come from how quick anyone is. It comes from three different products being sold under one label. A ready-made template with the text swapped out takes days. A site with a custom design and written content takes weeks. A site with a client login, a calculator or a link to warehouse software is not a website any more, it is a system, and it is estimated differently.
Before you compare dates from two quotes, check whether they cover the same scope. The same rule governs the number, and I broke that down in the piece on how much a website costs. Time and price are two sides of one decision about scope, so the offer with the short date and the low number is usually not a bargain, it is a different product.
On my side, websites for B2B companies run in weekly sprints with a demo at the end of each week, and you get the date in writing along with the scope and the price before anything starts. Not as a formality, but because a date without stages behind it is a wish rather than a commitment.
Frequently asked questions
When does the clock start? At acceptance of the offer and the deposit, not at the first conversation. If a month passes between the quote and the decision, the schedule moves by that month, because other projects are queued in the meantime.
Do I get the date in writing? Yes, together with the quote and the written scope. The start date and the go-live date sit in the same document as the price.
What if the delay is on my side? Nothing dramatic, the calendar simply moves and I say so straight away rather than at the end. Stages that depend on your material are marked in the schedule, so it is visible which week is waiting and for what.
Can a site be built in a week? It can, if we mean a simple site on a ready-made template, with content that already exists and no integrations. With a custom design and copy written from scratch, a week only means somebody has moved the risk onto you.
What happens after launch? Thirty days of care are included: fixes, small changes, and a response when something stops working. After that you can extend it or take the site on yourself, since the code has been yours since day one.
Need something like this on your side? I design and build websites for B2B companies - from scratch or as a rebuild of what already stands. Let’s talk about your project.