A response to How Long Does it Take to Build a Website? (April 2024)
In April 2024 I took on the second biggest question in every website sales process. After “how much will it cost?” comes “how long will it take?”
I gave a range I had used for years:
“I usually tell clients that project schedules range from three to four months for average projects and five to seven months for larger projects.”
That was honest at the time. A typical project moved through discovery, wireframes, visual design, development, training and content, then testing and launch. Development took a big share of that calendar.
The X-factors were never the developers
The most important part of that video wasn’t the range. It was my point that the two biggest schedule risks sat outside the developer’s control:
“And these two factors are almost entirely outside the control of the developer. They’re both client related factors.”
The first was the client team’s availability: how quickly meetings get scheduled and feedback comes back. The second was content: creating, editing, and migrating it. I said clients almost universally underestimate how long content takes.
Both of those are still true. If anything, they are now the whole story.
What collapsed
AI agents now write and revise custom code under experienced direction. The development phase, which used to take weeks of programmer time, can now move in a fraction of that. And because changes are cheap and fast, the back and forth after a design review no longer means waiting on a developer’s queue.
That changes the shape of the schedule. The phases themselves still exist. We still need discovery, planning, design, building, content, testing, and launch. But the building step is no longer the long pole in the tent. What determines the calendar now is how quickly decisions get made and how quickly content gets ready.
Agents can help with content too, especially with migration. Moving existing pages from an old site into a new one is exactly the kind of tedious work they are good at, with someone checking the result. But they can’t decide what your organization wants to say. Writing, reviewing, and approving content is still your team’s work, and it still takes longer than anyone expects.
Prototypes, without the cost
I also described one way we did things differently. Instead of static wireframes, we started projects with a working browser-based prototype:
“They describe a website but they don’t actually function like a website.”
That was my complaint about wireframes, and I stand by it. Clients understand a site much better when they can click through it.
The difference now is that building something that works is no longer the expensive step. Agents can produce a working version of a layout or a feature quickly, which means we can show a client a real, functioning page early, try another version if it isn’t right, and keep refining without the old cost of rework. The prototype I championed in 2024 and the finished site are much closer together now.
We don’t have to trade a fast schedule for careful planning. We can plan carefully, show real working pages early, and still finish sooner.
So how long does it take now?
I am not going to give you a new number. Every project is different, and I don’t want to promise a timeline in a blog post. What I can say is that the part of the schedule we control has shrunk a lot. The part you control matters more than ever.
The same advice I gave agencies in 2024 still applies. Be clear with clients that their availability and their content are the keys to hitting a date. Set expectations for how quickly feedback needs to come back. Start content early, earlier than feels necessary.
The difference is what happens when a client does all of that well. In 2024 the site still had to wait on development. Now, a responsive client with content ready can see their site go live remarkably fast. If you want to understand why the cost dropped along with the schedule, read our approach to pricing. For the bigger picture of how we build now, see the agentic WordPress revolution.
¡Viva la Revolución!