The honest 6-week timeline for a small business website project

A small business website project that’s done properly takes about six weeks. Some take eight. The very simple ones can be done in four. The ones that drag on for four months almost always do so because something in the process broke and nobody noticed for a fortnight.

The trouble is that most quotes don’t tell you what happens in those six weeks. They tell you the total price and the launch date. The middle is a black box.

Here’s what’s actually happening week by week, what’s on you vs. on the designer, and where projects most commonly stall. If you’re about to start a project, this is the read-through that’ll let you tell whether you’re in a healthy build or a stalled one.

Week 1: Discovery

The first week isn’t building. It’s figuring out what to build.

A good designer is doing four things this week:

• Understanding your business properly. Not surface-level — actually asking what your customers look like, where they come from, what the typical job/booking/transaction looks like, what makes you different from the four competitors you compete against most often.
• Auditing your current digital setup. Existing site, GBP, social, analytics if available. What’s working, what isn’t, what to keep, what to bin.
• Reviewing your reference sites. Three or four sites you like and three or four you don’t, with you walking through why. This is more informative than the designer pulling references in isolation.
• Mapping the structure. What pages exist, what each does, how they link to each other.

What’s on you this week: Show up to the discovery call genuinely prepared. Have honest numbers (current site traffic, current conversion rate, current job/booking volume) ready to share. Have your reference sites picked. Block out enough time for the call — most discovery calls go 60–90 minutes if done properly.

What typically goes wrong: Discovery gets compressed into a 30-minute call because the owner is busy. The designer fills the gaps with assumptions. Six weeks later the site looks fine but doesn’t quite fit the business, and nobody can articulate why. Fix: invest the time up front. The hour you save in week 1 costs five hours in week 5.

Week 2: Content and structure

This is the week most projects underestimate.

The deliverable at the end of week 2 should be: a complete site map (every page named), a structure for each page (what sections, in what order, with what headings), and a clear understanding of what copy needs to be written for each.

What’s actually happening: hard conversations about content. The designer is figuring out that you’ve been describing yourself in marketing-speak that doesn’t match how customers actually search. They’re proposing simpler, more specific language. You’re processing the discomfort of having to say what you do plainly. The home page hero gets written and rewritten four times.

What’s on you this week: Be honest about your content. If you don’t have good photos, say so now. If your existing copy is weak, say so now. If you’d rather hire a copywriter than write it yourself, decide now. The content is the bottleneck on every small business website project, and nobody wants to admit it because admitting it means doing more work.

What typically goes wrong: The owner agrees to “get the content together this week” and then doesn’t, because writing about yourself is harder than expected. Four weeks later the site is built but the content is still placeholder text. Fix: either commit to a real content sprint in this week, or hire help, or have the designer write a first draft for you to react to. All three are valid. The not-deciding is what kills projects.

Week 3: Design

Now the visual work starts.

The deliverable at the end of week 3 should be: a designed version of the home page and one or two other key pages, in enough fidelity that you can actually see what the site will look and feel like. Not a wireframe — a real design.

What’s actually happening: the designer is making decisions about typography, colour, photography style, animation, density. Some designers do this in Figma, some go straight to a working prototype, some build a moodboard first. The artefact matters less than the conversation.

What’s on you this week: Look at the designs the way your customers will. Not the way you would. Squint at it on your phone. Show it to your partner who’s never seen a brief. Imagine showing up at it cold after Googling for a tradie/clinic/café — does it work?

What typically goes wrong: The owner gets stuck on small visual preferences (the colour of one button, the corner radius of cards) and misses the structural questions (does the home page actually communicate what we do?). Or — more commonly — gives polite vague feedback (“I like it, looks nice”) instead of honest feedback, and ends up not loving the final result but feeling unable to push back. Fix: be specific in your feedback. “I’d like the hero text 30% bigger” is useful. “It feels a bit corporate to me” is useful. “It’s good” is not.

Week 4: Build

This is the quietest week from your perspective and the busiest for the designer.

The designer is taking the approved designs and turning them into a working site. Code, content management, integrations (booking widgets, contact forms, Google Maps), responsiveness across devices, accessibility checks, SEO foundation work.

If they’re building on a modern static framework (like Astro), this week tends to be efficient and clean. If they’re building on WordPress with a custom theme, it tends to involve more configuration than building. Either way, the time investment is real.

What’s on you this week: Mostly to be available for quick questions (“we need the actual phone number to use in the schema markup”, “what’s the contact email”, “can you send the high-res versions of those three photos?”). The designer is usually fine without you for most of this week, but the small inputs are blocking if they don’t come back fast.

What typically goes wrong: Small content gaps that should have been resolved in week 2 show up here. The “About Us” page text was never quite finalised. The case study photos aren’t quite the right ones. The contact form’s auto-reply text hasn’t been written. Each tiny gap is half a day of design time waiting on you. Fix: front-load these in week 2.

Week 5: Review and revisions

The site is built. Now you actually see it as a working thing, and your reaction is different to your reaction to the static designs in week 3.

This is the week where the real, honest revisions happen. Things that read fine in a Figma file feel different when you can scroll through the actual site. Animations that looked clever feel slow. Hero copy that read well in isolation feels off when you see it in context with the photo behind it.

A good revision round catches these things and addresses them in 2–4 days. A bad revision round either accepts the result as-is (because the owner doesn’t want to seem demanding) or spirals into endless tweaks (because the owner can’t articulate what they actually want changed).

What’s on you this week: Be brave about real feedback. The week 5 revision round is your chance to fix things that aren’t quite right. Once the site is live, those changes become “post-launch work” and start counting against your retainer (if you have one) or generating new invoices (if you don’t). Use the revision window properly.

What typically goes wrong: Owner reviews the site on their desktop only and approves it, then discovers two weeks after launch that the mobile experience has problems they should have caught in week 5. Fix: always do the review walkthrough on a phone too. Always.

Week 6: Launch

This is the lowest-drama week if everything else went well.

The designer is doing the final technical checks: redirects from old URLs to new ones, search console setup, sitemap submission, analytics installation, schema markup validation, mobile testing across devices, a final speed pass. Then DNS gets switched, the site goes live, and there’s about 48 hours of “watch for anything broken” before everyone exhales.

A clean launch is a non-event. You go live on Tuesday morning, by Wednesday afternoon things look fine, by Friday you’ve already had the first form submission/booking that came from the new site.

What’s on you this week: Mostly nothing structural, but be available. Respond fast if the designer pings you. Hand over any final access (analytics property, Google Search Console verification) if it’s needed. Sign off on the final invoice once you’re satisfied things are working.

What typically goes wrong: Launches over a weekend (so issues sit unfixed for 72 hours), launches the day before the owner goes on holiday (so urgent fixes wait), or launches without proper redirects from old URLs (which costs you SEO rankings for weeks). Fix: launch on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Don’t launch the week of a holiday.

Where projects actually go wrong

If you map the failure pattern across the six weeks, it’s not random.

About 60% of projects that stall do so because of content. The designer is waiting for copy, photos, testimonials, or final decisions about specific text — and the owner is too busy / unsure to provide them. Week 2 stretches into week 4, week 4 into week 7, week 7 into “we’ll get back to it next month”. Fix: do the content sprint in week 2 properly, or hire help.

About 25% stall because of decision-deferral. The owner says “let me think about it” at the design review and doesn’t come back for two weeks. The designer moves on to other projects. Picking up the momentum again costs another week. Fix: make decisions in the call, even imperfect ones. You can revise later.

About 10% stall because of designer overload. The designer took on too many parallel projects and yours is the one that gets pushed when something more urgent shows up. Fix: ask up front how many concurrent projects they run, and make sure your timeline expectations are realistic given that answer.

The last 5% stall because of technical complications — integrations that didn’t work as expected, third-party services that broke during build, scope that got bigger as you discovered what you actually needed. These are usually short delays rather than full stalls.

The honest version

If you’re about to start a website project, the realistic timeline is six weeks if both sides hold up their end. Eight weeks if there’s some content scramble. Twelve weeks if the content scramble is bad. Four months if everyone gets distracted and momentum dies.

The single biggest predictor of whether the project ships on time isn’t the designer’s skill. It’s whether you, the business owner, are going to make the content sprint in week 2 a real priority. If you can promise yourself you’ll do that — block the calendar, write the copy or hire a copywriter, gather the photos, make the decisions — the six-week version is genuinely achievable.

If you can’t, the project will take longer. That’s not a failure. It’s just honest about the constraint. The wider read on choosing the right designer, reading a quote, and what good ongoing support looks like once the project lands is in the complete guide to working with a Melbourne web designer.

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If you’d like to talk through whether your specific project is six-week territory or something bigger, book a 15-minute call and we’ll figure it out together. I’m happy to flag honestly if your scope is going to take longer than the standard timeline before you commit.