How Long Does a Website Rebuild Take?

If you are planning a website rebuild, the timeline question comes first. You have a launch to support, a campaign to run or a site that is losing you enquiries right now. The honest answer for a typical small business site of around five to eight pages is roughly two to four weeks from kickoff to launch, when the client side is ready to move. Larger sites and custom functions take longer.

The range comes down less to how complicated the site is and more to how prepared everyone is on day one.

What the weeks look like

A well-run rebuild usually moves through five stages.

• Discovery and planning, about three to five days. Agreeing what the site needs to achieve, who it is for, which pages it needs and how visitors should move through them.
• Design, about a week. Homepage and key templates first, then the remaining pages once the direction is approved.
• Build, about one to two weeks. Turning the designs into a working, responsive site, plus forms, analytics and any tools that need connecting, such as a booking system or CRM.
• Testing and revisions, about three to five days. Checking browsers, devices and forms, fixing the small things that always turn up, and getting sign-off.
• Launch and handover. Redirects, final checks and documentation so you know how the site works.

A single-page site can be faster. A site with a blog, gated content or custom functionality sits at the longer end.

Where projects actually slip

Delays are rarely about the code. They come from a few predictable places.

• Slow feedback. A design review that should take a day sits in an inbox for a week because several people need to weigh in. Every idle day is added directly to the project and pushes everything after it.
• Scope creep. A careers page or a rebuilt pricing table sounds small, but each addition resets part of the sequence.
• Content that is not ready. Copy and photos are often assumed to come together during the build. Writing good copy takes real time, and it holds up everything if it arrives late.
• Too many decision makers. Conflicting opinions from several people cost more time than any technical problem.
• Technical surprises. Old hosting, unclear domain ownership, or an existing site that is more tangled than expected.

How to keep a rebuild on schedule

• Name one person who approves work and gives feedback
• Agree on a fixed list of pages and functions before design starts
• Have your copy and images ready, or agree who is producing them and by when
• Sort out domain and hosting access in the first week
• Commit to feedback within a day or two of each review

Redirects and search visibility

If your current site has pages that people find through Google, a rebuild can hurt you when old addresses stop working. Part of the work is mapping old pages to new ones with permanent redirects, keeping page titles and headings sensible, and submitting a fresh sitemap after launch. This is easy to forget in the excitement of a new design, and it is one of the most common reasons a new site performs worse than the one it replaced.

Sometimes a rebuild is not needed

If your site is slow, broken on mobile or unreliable, the fix may be smaller than a full rebuild. An audit can show whether targeted repairs will do the job. Website fixes typically take one to two weeks, and every one starts with a free audit. Read more about our website fixes service.

Planning your own timeline

Work backwards from the date you need the site live. Add a buffer for feedback and content, and start the conversations about copy and domain access early. If you would like a scoped timeline for your project, the first step is a short discovery call. See how it works.