A landing page takes weeks; a small business site one to two months; a larger marketing site two to three; an online store three to four; a custom web application many months. Those are the public estimates below, and they assume the content is ready and decisions are made quickly. When they are not, every type takes longer.
This guide is part of our web design guides. What a store costs is in how much an ecommerce website costs; what to check when replacing an existing site is in the website redesign checklist.
Timings by site type, from public estimates
Two web-industry publishers give dated timelines by type. eSEOspace's timeline by project type (17 October 2025) puts a landing page or single-page site at 1 to 3 weeks, a small business website of 5 to 10 pages at 4 to 8 weeks, a standard WordPress marketing site of 10 to 25 pages at 6 to 12 weeks, an ecommerce store on WooCommerce or Shopify with up to about 100 products at 10 to 16 weeks, a custom web application or platform at 4 to 9 months and often ongoing, and a large enterprise or content-heavy site of 100 or more pages with integrations at 4 to 8 months.
WPX's 2026 guide (20 January 2026) lands in the same places: a basic informational site by a professional developer at 4 to 8 weeks, a small or mid-sized business WordPress site at 4 to 6 weeks and a standard agency project at 6 to 10 weeks, a small WooCommerce store at 1 to 2 weeks against 6 to 12 months or longer for a large store with thousands of products and inventory integration, a custom web app or SaaS product at 6 to 12 months or longer, a membership site at 4 to 10 weeks, and a single-page template site at a few hours to a day. These are estimates from publishers in the web industry, not surveys, and they assume the content is ready and the client decides quickly. The table below puts the two side by side.
Where the time goes
The build is not the longest part. eSEOspace divides a project into discovery and planning at 10 to 15% of the calendar, design at 20 to 30%, development at 30 to 40%, content population at 10 to 20% and testing and launch at 10 to 15%, and notes that development itself is rarely more than 40% of the timeline. That matches what we see: on a ten-week small business site, roughly a week of planning, two to three weeks of design, three to four of build, one to two of getting the content in, and one of testing and launch. A client who expects the whole project to be "building" is surprised twice: by how long the planning takes, and by how much of the calendar waits on their own content.
A landing page: one to three weeks
One page, one action, one audience. The time goes on the offer and the words, the design and the form, and testing the form and the tracking before paid traffic hits it. A landing page can be live in a week when the offer is decided and the copy exists; the two-to-three-week version is the one where the offer is being decided during the project. Our landing page design service and the landing page best practices guide cover what goes on the page.
A small business site: four to eight weeks
Five to ten pages: home, services, about, contact and a few more. The time goes on agreeing the page plan and the words, designing two or three templates, building them on WordPress or a similar platform, getting the content in and testing phones, forms and speed. The four-week version has ready content and one approver; the eight-week version is waiting for photographs and the owner's review.
A larger marketing site: six to twelve weeks
Ten to twenty-five pages, several templates, a blog or resource section, perhaps a few integrations such as a CRM form or a booking tool. The extra time is mostly content: more pages to write and approve, and more people involved in approving them. A site this size that replaces an existing one also needs a redirect map and a search-traffic check, which the website redesign checklist guide sets out; that work runs alongside the build rather than after it.
An online store: ten to sixteen weeks, or far longer
A store with up to about a hundred products on Shopify or WooCommerce sits at 10 to 16 weeks in eSEOspace's estimate; WPX puts a small WooCommerce store at 1 to 2 weeks and a large store with thousands of products and an inventory integration at 6 to 12 months or longer. The spread is the products. Every product needs a title, a description, images, variants, prices, shipping rules and tax settings, and that data usually does not exist in a usable form when the project starts. Payments, shipping and tax integrations, and connections to inventory or accounting systems, add weeks each. Our Shopify development service and the ecommerce website cost guide cover the rest.
A custom web application: four to twelve months
A site that does something, rather than says something: a portal, a booking system, a SaaS product. Both estimates put it at months to a year or more, and both note that it is often never finished, because a product keeps being developed after launch. The time goes on defining what it does, designing the flows, building and testing the logic and the data, and integrating with other systems. Our web application development team scopes these as products with a first version, and our guide to SaaS development cost covers the budget side.
What makes a build run over
Six causes cover most late projects:
- Late or missing content. eSEOspace names it the most common cause, and it matches our experience: the design is done and the pages wait for words and pictures.
- Slow or scattered feedback. Three approvers who each review a week apart add three weeks to every round.
- Scope creep. Pages and features added after the page plan was agreed, each one small, together a month.
- Third-party dependencies. A payment provider's approval, a domain transfer, a plugin's bug fix, a CRM's API access, none of which the builder controls.
- Too many revision rounds. Often, eSEOspace notes, a sign that discovery was skipped; the site is being designed in the review meetings.
- Launch blockers found late. Redirects, tracking and the test site's indexing status, checked in the last week instead of the first.
How to hit a launch date
Six things that shorten the calendar more than any amount of faster coding:
- Have the content ready before design starts, or write a content schedule into the plan with names and dates.
- Name one approver, with a review turnaround of two or three working days written into the project.
- Freeze the scope at the page plan. New pages and features go on a list for after launch.
- Choose the platform for the job, not for the builder's preference: a template for a page that must be live this week, a custom build for a site that must last.
- Plan the redirects and the tracking in week one if a site already exists.
- Build on a test site you can see, so review happens as the work goes, not in one round at the end.
Conclusion
How long a website takes to build depends first on its type, roughly weeks for a landing page, one to two months for a small business site, two to three for a larger marketing site, three to four for a store with a hundred products, and many months for a custom application, on the public estimates above. It depends second on the client: content arriving on time, one approver, a frozen scope and early redirect and tracking plans move a project more than anything the builder does. Development is rarely more than 40% of the calendar.
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. Our web design team agrees the goals, the page plan and the words before designing, builds on a test site you can follow, and launches with redirects, backups and tracking in place; our guide to how to choose a web design company says what to ask any builder about dates.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.