The quick answer
- Starter landing page: 1–2 weeks
- Focused marketing site (5–10 pages): 6–10 weeks
- Larger marketing site (15+ pages, motion-heavy): 10–16 weeks
- Custom e-commerce: 12–20 weeks
Those are typical at Designer Digital. Let me unpack what each phase actually involves.
Where the time goes
A typical 6–10 week marketing site project breaks down roughly as follows:
- Week 1–2: Discovery. Interviews, brand audit, sitemap, content review. We deliver a written brief at the end.
- Week 2–4: Design. Wireframes, then high-fidelity mockups. Two structured revision rounds.
- Week 4–8: Development. Hand-coding starts as soon as design hits 70% — we don't wait for full design sign-off because some details are easier to refine in code.
- Week 6–9: Content + integration. Copy review, animation polish, CRM and analytics integration, deployment to a staging URL.
- Week 9–10: Launch. DNS cutover, performance verification, 14-day stabilization window.
The phases overlap on purpose. A strict waterfall (design fully done before development starts) doubles the timeline. Modern agency work runs design and development in parallel for the second half of the project.
What causes delays
Three common culprits:
- Content not ready. Most projects stall waiting for copy or photography. If you need our help producing content, build it into the timeline. If you're producing it in-house, lock the deliverables before kickoff.
- Stakeholder availability. Decisions need to land within 48 hours during active phases. If your team can't reach consensus on a logo direction or brand color in two days, expect 1-week-per-phase slippage.
- Scope creep. "Can we add a calculator to the home page?" mid-project adds weeks. We bill for these changes; we also extend the timeline so the work doesn't get rushed.
Faster than 6 weeks
Our $297 starter is built for compression — 1–2 weeks for a single hand-coded landing page. It works because the scope is tight from the first call: one page, your existing brand, your existing copy with light editing, no CMS, deployed to Vercel.
Faster than that on full marketing sites is possible with a 20–30% rush premium and a hard scope lock. Below 4 weeks on anything substantial usually compromises either design quality or development quality, so we'll typically decline rather than ship something compromised.
Slower than 16 weeks
Some projects take longer:
- Brand identity from scratch + new website: 12–20 weeks combined.
- Headless commerce migrations: 16–24 weeks (data migration is the slow part).
- Multi-location dealer / franchise sites: 14–20 weeks.
- SaaS marketing sites with deep documentation: 10–14 weeks just for content alongside the build.
If your project is in this bracket, expect a phased delivery — phase 1 launches a homepage and core pages, phase 2 fills in the rest after launch.
What's reasonable to ask of an agency
A short checklist:
- A weekly status update is reasonable. Daily Slack messages aren't.
- Two structured revision rounds per design deliverable is standard. Unlimited revisions usually mean a slower project, not a better one.
- Async Loom reviews are faster than scheduled meetings. Most modern agencies (us included) default to async.
- Staging URLs from week 4 onward let you watch progress. Hidden development is a red flag.
How to keep your project on time
The single highest-leverage thing you can do: lock the content. Sites stall waiting for copy. If we can write a first draft together in week 1, the project ships on schedule. If copy is "still being reviewed" in week 6, the project slips two weeks.