Our actual numbers
A five-page site goes live within a week. A full custom multi-page site takes about two weeks. A large site with per-service and per-area pages takes two to three. Full custom development is quoted per project because the honest answer depends entirely on what is being built.
Those are the same figures on the pricing page, and they assume one thing that we will come back to.
Why other quotes say twelve weeks
Three reasons, and only one of them is about your project.
The first is queueing. An agency running eight projects at once is not working on yours for eight weeks of the twelve. The timeline is a scheduling artifact, not an estimate of effort.
The second is padding for client delay, which is rational. More on that below.
The third is process theater. Discovery workshops, mood boards, stakeholder alignment sessions. Some of that is genuinely useful on a large project. On a fifteen-page site for a local contractor, a lot of it exists to justify the invoice.
The delay is almost never the build
Here is the thing nobody says in a sales call: the reason your last website took six months is probably you.
Not in a bad way. You have a business to run. But a website needs decisions and material from the client, and those arrive in fits. The design is approved in two days and then the About page copy sits unwritten for five weeks. The build was finished in week two.
Our contract states it plainly: delays in feedback or content shift the schedule by at least the length of the delay. That is not a penalty clause, it is arithmetic.
The projects that finish in a week are not the simple ones. They are the ones where somebody answered emails the same day.
What actually happens, week by week
For a typical two-week custom build:
Days 1 to 2: scope and access
What the site needs to do, what pages exist, who it is for. Domain and DNS access sorted now, because that is the thing that blocks launch day if it is left. The pre-flight list covers what to have ready.
Days 3 to 5: design
Real pages with your real content, not a mockup of a fake business. You see it in a browser on your phone, because that is where your customers will see it.
Days 6 to 9: build
Every page built, responsive across sizes, forms wired and tested, on-page SEO written as the pages are built rather than bolted on after.
Days 10 to 12: your review
The part with the widest variance. Some clients turn it around in a morning. Some take three weeks. This is the whole ballgame.
Days 13 to 14: launch
DNS cutover, redirects from old URLs, Search Console, sitemap submitted, forms tested one more time from a phone on cellular.
How to make it faster
- Have your content before day one. Not polished. Written.
- Name one decider. A committee of four adds a week per round, minimum.
- Batch your feedback. One list beats nine emails, and it is faster for you too.
- Find your domain login now. Before the project starts. This is the single most common launch-day blocker and it is always avoidable.
- Say what you mean about the design. "Make it pop" costs a round. "The headline is too small and I do not like the orange" costs an hour.
When a longer timeline is correct
Sometimes three weeks is not enough, and pushing for speed is the wrong instinct.
Selling online is the clearest case. A store has tax rules, shipping logic and a checkout that has to work the first time, and Alaska shipping alone eats days that a Lower 48 build never spends.
Migrations are the other. Moving a site with four hundred existing URLs means mapping redirects one by one, and skipping that is how a redesign loses rankings that took years to build. That work is slow, invisible, and the most valuable thing in the project.
Anything with a third-party integration inherits somebody else's timeline. If your booking system takes nine days to approve an API key, the project takes nine more days.
Launch is not the finish line
The first month after launch is when the useful information arrives. Which pages people read, where they leave, what they searched to get there. Rankings take longer, usually months, and there is no version of this where they arrive in week three.
A site launched and never touched again is a site slowly getting worse. That is what maintenance is for, and it is a separate decision rather than something we bundle in and hope you forget.