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Business & Strategy

Project Timeline

Time to Launch | Website Project Timeline

Portrait of Robert Klimant, co-founder of Roelu Studio
Robert KlimantCo-founder

What is Project Timeline?

A Website Project Timeline is the planned schedule of a website build from kickoff to launch, broken into phases. A typical custom website project timeline for a scale-up runs eight to sixteen weeks, covering discovery, design, development, content migration, QA, and launch. The exact length depends on the scope, the number of pages, the integrations, and how fast the client side can review and approve.

Why it matters

The biggest source of delay on a website project is not the team building it. It is the client side — feedback cycles that take two weeks instead of two days, stakeholders added late, content delivered halfway through development. A realistic timeline accounts for that. It also exposes a quiet truth: a four-week timeline is almost always a template build dressed up as custom. Serious custom work takes serious time. Twelve weeks for a real homepage, sitemap, design system, build, and content migration is not slow — it is honest. The studios that promise four are either cutting discovery or shipping a theme with your logo on it.

How it works

A typical timeline opens with one to three weeks of discovery — interviews, audits, sitemap, brief. Design runs three to five weeks, usually one or two rounds of homepage exploration followed by inner pages and a component system in Figma. Development overlaps the back half of design and runs four to eight weeks — front-end build in Next.js or Astro, CMS setup in Sanity, integrations, performance work. Content migration and QA fill the final one to two weeks. Launch is a coordinated cutover, usually on a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, with a rollback plan ready. Post-launch, a two-week hyper-care window catches anything the team missed.

Related terms

  • Discovery Process

    Business & Strategy

    The kickoff phase of a project where the team digs into goals, audience, content, and competition before any design or code happens — the part that quietly…

  • Website Redesign

    Websites

    A full visual and structural overhaul of an existing site — new design system, new content model, often a new platform — done because the old one no longer…

  • Website Maintenance

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    The ongoing work of keeping a website fast, secure, and current after launch — content updates, dependency upgrades, performance checks, and the boring stuff…

  • Website Migration

    Websites

    Moving a website to a new platform, domain, or hosting setup — and the careful work of doing it without losing rankings, traffic, or content along the way.…

  • Custom Web Development

    Websites

    Building a website from scratch with a designer and developer, instead of using a template or no-code platform — owned by you, shaped to your business, no…

  • Staging Environment

    Websites

    A private copy of your website where the team can preview changes, test new features, and catch problems before pushing them live to real visitors. Also called…