How long does a redesign
actually take?
Most small-business redesigns take six to ten weeks from signed agreement to launch day, with focused landing-page projects running shorter and full brand-plus-site engagements running longer. Here is where those weeks go, and the honest truth about what makes timelines slip.
Published August 25, 2026 · 5 min read
How long does a typical website redesign take?
Six to ten weeks for a small-business site of roughly five to ten pages. Brand-only work typically runs three to four weeks. Projects pairing a full brand system with a website commonly run eight to twelve. Anyone quoting dramatically less is either describing a template swap or skipping steps that show up later.
Where the weeks go
- **Weeks 1–2 · Discovery & content inventory.** Goals, audiences, sitemap, and an honest audit of existing content. Ends with a plan everyone signed.
- **Weeks 2–4 · Design.** Homepage concept first, then interior layouts. One or two structured revision rounds — bounded rounds are what keep this phase short.
- **Weeks 4–7 · Build.** Design becomes fast, working pages. Real content goes in here, not lorem ipsum — placeholder text hides problems real words expose.
- **Weeks 7–8 · Review & polish.** Cross-device testing, accessibility passes, forms wired to real inboxes, analytics verified.
- **Weeks 8–10 · Launch & stabilization.** Redirects, search engine submission, live-environment checks, and a watch window for anything unexpected.
What speeds projects up
- Decisions arriving in batches — one consolidated round of feedback beats daily drips.
- Content readiness: photos, credentials, and service lists gathered early.
- A named decision-maker. Committee-by-email adds weeks all by itself.
- Scope agreed up front, so mid-project additions ride a change order instead of stalling the line.
What slows projects down
- Copy written during the build phase — the single most common delay we see.
- Unanswered questions compounding: a stalled approval early pushes everything after it.
- New stakeholders appearing in week six with week-one opinions.
- Treating the redesign as a chance to also reorganize the entire company — adjacent projects belong on their own tracks.
Planning a redesign without breaking what already works
If your current site earns traffic today, the migration deserves as much care as the design. Preserving URLs or mapping redirects, submitting updated sitemaps, and watching search indexing after launch are standard parts of our launch checklist — Google publishes detailed guidance for site moves precisely because skipping it quietly erases rankings that took years to build.
Curious what your timeline would look like? Bring us your deadline and your current site — we will map the weeks for you before you commit to anything.