How Long Does a Website or Online Store Take? A Realistic Timeline

"How long will it take?" — the second question after price. The usual answer is "it depends on the project," which is true and useless. Here is a realistic timeline by project type, and what actually causes delays. Timeline by project type Visual identity and company profile: 5 to 10 working days. Logo, colours, typography, and a profile document ready to send. The fastest stage, because no development is involved. A 3–5 page business website: two to three weeks. Home, about, services, work, contact — with responsive design, WhatsApp linking and a contact form. An online store: three to six weeks. A store is not a website with extra pages; it has products, inventory, cart, payments, shipping, invoices and an admin panel — each one needing to be built and tested. A custom platform or system: six weeks to several months. Bookings, subscriptions, user accounts with permissions, integrations with external systems. No honest number exists here before the requirements are studied. Fixing an existing site: one day to one week for a specific problem. But "the site is slow" or "the site is hacked" needs diagnosis first, because the cause is often somewhere unrelated to what you see. What the time is actually made of People imagine the whole period is coding. Reality is closer to this: • Understanding requirements and setting scope: 10% • Design and approval: 25% • Development: 40% • Content, review and revisions: 15% • Testing and launch: 10% Note that coding is under half the time. That is why a "simple" project can slip by weeks. The three biggest causes of delay — all on the client side 1. Content is not ready. This is number one by a wide margin. Design finishes, development finishes, and then the project waits two weeks because the service copy and product photos have not arrived. Write your content in parallel with design, not after it. 2. Too many decision makers. When every design passes through three people with different opinions, a two-day review cycle becomes a week. Appoint one person who owns the final decision. 3. Scope growing mid-build. "Can we add a blog?" "Can we add login?" Every addition made during the build reshuffles what was already constructed. Collect additions into a phase two after launch. How to cut the timeline in half • Prepare content before the project starts: page copy, images, logo, contact details, social accounts. • Sort out domain and hosting early — a domain transfer alone can take up to 7 days. • Assign one person for approvals. • Review in one batch: collect all your notes into a single list instead of sending them piecemeal over days. • Separate clearly what is required before launch from what would be nice to add later. An important warning sign If someone promises you a complete online store in three days, they will either hand you an unmodified template or miss the deadline entirely. Unrealistic speed is not a feature — it is the first sign of a project that will end in a dispute. At Phillote we put a specific delivery time in writing in the quote before you pay, and split payment into stages tied to progress. Send us your project description and get a clear timeline and price within 24 hours.