How long does a website take?
It depends how often it stops.

Correcting one intuition first

"A five-page site is four times faster than a twenty-page one" — that intuition is largely wrong.

The actual rule is that how alike the pages are matters more than how many there are. Twenty product pages built from one layout with different text and images is far less work than five individually designed pages.

And the bigger variable is stoppage. A five-page site that waits three days for your approval each time, eight times over, has consumed a month. A twenty-page site with content ready and decisions made promptly may well launch sooner.

Where the time actually goes

1. Waiting for content — usually the largest share

   Waiting for text, for photos, for you to approve revisions. This depends almost entirely on your side, and it is the only part you can compress directly. Preparing properly before work starts removes most of it. See seven things to prepare first.

2. Structure and design — iteration is normal, endless iteration is not

   Once the home page and one inner page are settled, the rest goes quickly. Two or three rounds on the home page is a healthy rhythm. Still tearing it up at round six or seven usually is not a design problem — it means step one, what the site is for, was never made clear. That has to be re-aligned; more revisions will not fix it.

3. Development — the most predictable part

   Once structure and design are settled, this is the easiest part to estimate, because it depends on workload rather than decisions. Little to show midway, but you can ask for a working preview address and click around yourself.

4. Pre-launch testing and finishing — easiest to squeeze, and should not be

   Walk it on a phone, actually send a form email, click every link, deliberately break something and check a failure shows. It does not consume much time, and skipping it means every problem surfaces within a week of launch, when fixing costs far more.

Of the four, only the first depends mainly on you — and it happens to be the largest. Which is why chasing the schedule so often achieves nothing: the chasing lands on the third block while the jam is in the first.

How to estimate your own project

No need for day-level precision. Answering four questions gives you a working sense of it.

1. Is the content ready

   Text and photos in hand means weeks. Assembling as you go means months. This question outweighs the other three combined.

2. How many distinct page layouts

   Not total pages — distinct layouts. Three or four is a common size; more than eight means the site is more complex than it looks.

3. Do you need an admin panel or features

   A site that only presents information and one with booking, ordering or self-editing are different scales entirely. Deciding which parts you need to edit yourself settles this question.

4. Is there an old site to migrate

   If the old site ranks, every old address has to be redirected one by one — invisible work that cannot be skipped. See rebuild the old site or improve it.

Why chasing the schedule backfires

This sounds like deflection, but it is true and it is useful to you.

1. Chasing produces "finish it and move on"

   Under pressure, the parts that get cut are the invisible ones: building before structure is settled, treating testing as a formality. That saved time comes back doubled after launch.

2. Building pages in parallel copies mistakes everywhere

   Working a dozen pages at once to save time means a problem set on page one gets replicated a dozen times. Fixing it then means a dozen edits — far slower than doing them in sequence.

3. Only one thing genuinely speeds this up

   Supplying your decisions and content early. It is the only accelerant that does not cost quality, and it works far better than pressure.

Questions this article gets