The honest answer is eight to sixteen weeks for most projects, and the reason that range is so wide has almost nothing to do with how fast anyone designs or codes.

Timelines are set by how quickly decisions get made, how ready your content is, and how many people have to approve. Agencies know this, which is why the quoted timeline and the actual one so often diverge.

Realistic ranges

• A single-page or campaign site. Two to four weeks. Little to decide, one template, content usually already written for the campaign.
• A company website. Eight to sixteen weeks across discovery, definition, design and delivery. This is where most projects land.
• An ecommerce build. Twelve weeks upward, and the catalogue is usually the constraint rather than the design.
• A platform or portal. Months, not weeks. Search, accounts, integrations and real inventory all need designing and testing rather than assembling.
• A product audit. Considerably shorter, which is why it is a sensible way to start when the scope is not yet clear.

What actually sets the clock

Four things, in roughly this order of impact.

• How fast you decide. A project with one decision-maker moves at a completely different speed from one where every screen goes to a committee. This is the single largest variable and it is entirely on the client side.
• Whether the content exists. Copy, photography and product data are the most common cause of overrun by a distance. Design can proceed on placeholder text for a while, but not indefinitely, and the day it stops is usually the day the timeline slips.
• Integrations. A contact form adds nothing. A CRM, a listings feed, a payment gateway or an ERP each bring their own discovery, their own unknowns and frequently their own third party who does not share your deadline.
• Approvals you did not budget for. Legal review, brand sign-off, a regulator, a parent company in another timezone. None of these appear on a project plan until they stop it.

Why "six weeks" quotes slip

Because they are usually quoting the design and build, not the project. The six weeks is real — it is the time the agency needs with everything in hand. What it excludes is the fortnight waiting for photography, the week your legal team takes, and the three rounds of feedback that arrive as a forwarded email chain.

A proposal that gives you a timeline without telling you what it assumes from you is not a plan. It is an estimate of their effort.

How to genuinely compress it

You can move faster, but not by asking anyone to work harder.

• Name one decision-maker. Someone who can say yes without a meeting. This saves more time than any other single intervention.
• Start the content before the design. Even rough copy. It is the long pole and it almost never starts early enough.
• Front-load the awkward conversations. Arabic or not, which integrations, what is out of scope. Decisions made late cost multiples of decisions made early.
• Book the approvers in advance. If legal needs two weeks, that fortnight belongs in the plan, not in the overrun.
• Agree what "done" means for each stage before starting it.

What we commit to

Most of our projects run eight to sixteen weeks across four phases. If you have a fixed deadline — a launch event, a handover date, a funding round — tell us at the start rather than the middle. It changes how we scope, and occasionally it changes our advice to "do less, properly" rather than everything at once.

On a subscription, onboarding to first design output takes 48 hours, which is a different proposition from a project and suits a different kind of need.

The questions we get asked most covers both, and there is a companion piece on what a website costs in Dubai.