For a custom, professionally built website, three months is our baseline. In practice, many projects run to four or five.

The design and development work itself has a relatively predictable rhythm. What’s harder to predict is everything around it — and that’s usually where time goes. Stakeholders are busy. Decisions that need three people in a room can take two weeks to schedule. Content that was going to be ready by week four arrives in week eight. A round of feedback comes back from four different directions and needs to be reconciled before anything moves forward.

This is simply the reality of how ambitious collaborative projects work inside real businesses. A website isn’t something that happens to a company. It’s something a company builds with us, and the timeline reflects that.

What we’ve found over many years is that urgency is a significant factor in pace. Clients replacing an existing site — where the current one is still live and functional — often have less pressure to move quickly, and the project naturally breathes to fill the space available. When there’s a hard launch date, a product release, or a business event driving the timeline, things move with remarkable efficiency.

To keep projects healthy and prevent them from drifting indefinitely, we now build a six-month sunset clause into every engagement. If a project extends beyond that window — almost always due to delays on the client side rather than ours — we pause, reassess, and restart with fresh momentum. It protects both parties and ensures the work that launches actually reflects where the business is today, not where it was when the brief was written.

The best thing a client can do to keep a project on track is simple: be available, make decisions, and get content to us on time. We’ll take care of the rest.

“A website isn’t something that happens to a company. It’s something a company builds with us.”