A small business marketing site takes about four to eight weeks from kickoff to launch. A Shopify store or a B2B build usually takes eight to sixteen.
The part people get wrong is what fills those weeks. Design and code are the predictable half. The schedule stretches on the other half: content that has not been written, photos nobody has taken, and a decision that two people disagree about.
What is the actual range by project type?
These are the windows we schedule against, assuming decisions come back within a few days:
- Landing page: two to three weeks. One page, one offer, one round of review.
- Small marketing site, five to eight pages: four to eight weeks.
- Redesign of an existing site: similar to a new build, plus time for the URL and redirect work that keeps your rankings intact. That work is not optional and it is covered in redesigning without losing rankings.
- Shopify store: eight to twelve weeks for a normal catalogue. Longer if products are being migrated from another platform.
- B2B portal with account pricing or quote flows: twelve to sixteen weeks and up, because the rules behind the pricing have to be pinned down before anything can be built. More on that in taking wholesale orders online.
If a studio quotes you two weeks for a full site, ask what they are skipping. Usually it is a template with your logo dropped in, and the honest version of that trade-off is in what a website costs.
Why does the calendar stretch when the build does not?
Because a website project is not one continuous stretch of work. It is short bursts of work separated by waiting.
The design of a homepage might be two days of effort. Then it sits for six days while you find time to look at it properly. That is one review cycle: two days of work, eight days of calendar. Run four of those across a project and you have added a month without anybody being slow or unreasonable.
This is the single most useful thing to understand before you commit to a launch date. Your response time is a bigger lever on the schedule than the size of the team building it.
What holds up almost every project?
Content. Specifically the words on your pages and the photographs of your work.
Nobody expects this to be the hard part, and it is the hard part almost every time. Design can proceed on placeholder text for a while, but the site cannot launch on it. So the project reaches ninety percent, and then it waits weeks for the About page and a set of usable photos.
Two things fix it:
Write badly and fast. Do not try to produce polished copy. Send us bullet points, a voice memo, the email you already send to new customers explaining what you do. Editing raw material into good page copy is quick. Waiting for you to become a writer is not.
Book the photographer in week one. Not week five. Photography has its own lead time, and on a trades or restaurant job it can also depend on weather or a finished project to shoot. If you are relying on stock imagery instead, decide that early too, so nobody is holding a page open waiting for something that was never coming.
Who is allowed to say yes?
Name one decision maker before kickoff.
Projects with two owners of equal standing move at roughly half speed, and the delay is not the disagreement itself. It is that each round of feedback now needs both people to look, and their calendars rarely line up. Worse, contradictory feedback in the same email means the next version has to satisfy two different briefs.
Have the internal argument first. Send one answer.
What makes e-commerce take longer?
Products are data, and data is work.
Every item needs a title, a description, a price, images, weight and dimensions for shipping, and variants if it comes in sizes or colours. Fifty products is a real project on its own, separate from designing the store. If your catalogue lives in a spreadsheet or an accounting system, we can import it, but it still has to be cleaned first, and that pass surfaces every gap in the data at once.
Then there are the things you have to decide rather than build: shipping rules by region and weight, tax setup, return policy, whether wholesale customers see different prices, what happens when something is out of stock. None of it takes long individually. All of it takes longer than you expect to get answers to. What that scope looks like in practice is on the e-commerce page.
Payment and shipping account approvals also sit outside the project. Apply early.
What can delay a launch that nobody controls?
A handful of things are on external clocks:
- Domain and DNS. If the domain has to move between registrars, or the registrant contact has to change, registrars apply transfer locks that can last weeks. Start this at the beginning of the project, not the week of launch.
- Email. Moving a mailbox or changing mail records is its own small project, and it belongs on a different day than the website launch.
- Third-party tools. Booking systems, payment gateways and merchant accounts all have their own approval timelines.
Every one of these depends on having access to accounts that may not be in your name. That is worth checking now rather than during launch week, and the six accounts to look at are listed in who actually owns your website.
Can you go faster?
Yes, in three ways that work and one that does not.
Cut scope, not quality. Launch six pages instead of fourteen. The other eight can be added after launch without redoing anything, as long as the structure was planned for them.
Phase it. A single strong landing page can go live while the full site is being built. If you are running ads or opening a location, this is usually the right call.
Have content ready before kickoff. A project that starts with copy and photos in hand runs at close to the speed of the build itself.
What does not work is adding people. A website is not a task that splits cleanly across more hands, and a bigger team means more coordination, not a shorter calendar.
What a normal six-week schedule looks like
- Week 1: scope, sitemap, page-by-page content plan, account access collected, domain work started.
- Week 2: design of the homepage and one interior template. First review.
- Weeks 3 to 4: build, remaining pages, real content loaded as it arrives.
- Week 5: full review round, revisions, forms and analytics tested end to end.
- Week 6: performance pass, redirects if it is a redesign, launch checks, go live.
Then the site keeps changing, which is what the Care Plan is for. Launch day is a milestone, not an ending.
What to have ready before you ask for a start date
- One named decision maker.
- A rough list of the pages you think you need.
- Whatever copy already exists, in any state.
- Photos, or a booked date to take them.
- Logins for your domain, hosting and analytics.
- A real deadline if you have one, and the reason behind it. A trade show or a season change tells us what to cut.
Bring those six and a six-week project runs in six weeks.
New site and landing page work starts at $1,200 CAD, e-commerce and B2B builds start at $2,900 CAD, and ongoing care starts at $129 CAD per month. Full ranges are on the pricing page, and what we build is on the web design page.
Want a realistic timeline for your specific situation? Send us your site and we will tell you what we would tackle first and roughly how long it would take, whether or not you work with us.