How long does a website redesign take? Timelines by scope and phase

The short answer

A website redesign usually takes two to three months for a small marketing site, roughly three to five months for a mid-size B2B or SaaS site, and four months to a year for a large site or one that also changes platform, judging by the schedules agencies publish. A visual refresh that keeps the pages, URLs and platform can take two to six weeks. We read every figure below on 7 November 2026.

Then add the stretch after launch: about 90 days before you can fairly judge the result. Google says a small to medium-sized site can take "a few weeks for most pages to move" after its URLs change (Google Search Central), Core Web Vitals are a 28-day rolling average (Chrome UX Report), and Search Console data normally arrives two to three days late (Search Console Help).

What sets the date is rarely the code. It's how ready the content is, how many people approve each step, the integrations, and how many URLs change. This guide is about time. For the tasks in each phase, see our website redesign checklist; for the budget, what a website redesign costs; and for a site built from nothing, how long it takes to build a website.

Website redesign timelines by scope

Agencies publish redesign timelines by page count or by type of project. Side by side, they fall into four bands:

Read these as each agency's claim about its own projects, not as a survey. Page count is also a rough proxy. Cuberto points out that a large site doesn't have to mean a long redesign when its structure is systematic and it has few unique templates: thirty pages built from four templates move faster than ten pages that each need their own design. For what a large corporate site has to include, see our guide to corporate website development.

What each source publishes

Here is what each source publishes, and how current it is:

Two patterns run through all of them. Every range widens when the client's side slows down: Clique Studios says projects can run 30 to 50% past its ranges when decisions are delayed, content isn't ready, custom features pile up or the scope grows. And the phase lists add up to more than the headline totals, because phases overlap: Clique Studios' own mid-size phases sum to 18–26 weeks against a headline of 12–16. When you compare quotes, compare the phases and what each one includes, not only the end date.

How long each phase takes, and what it depends on

Discovery and baseline: 1 to 4 weeks

Published schedules give discovery anything from weeks 1–2 of a 12-week plan (Woods MarCom) to 2–4 weeks (Solved Consulting); Phenomenon Studio allots 2–3 weeks to auditing a 10–30 page site. In a redesign this phase has deadlines built into the data. Search Console keeps 16 months of performance data (Google), Google Analytics 4 explorations keep 2 or 14 months on standard properties (Analytics Help), and Search Console's bulk export to BigQuery starts with the day you set it up, without earlier data (Search Console Help). Export in week one, not the week before launch.

Depends on: access to analytics, Search Console, the CMS and the domain registrar, and time with the people in sales and support who know what visitors ask.

Content: 3 to 8 weeks, alongside design

Woods MarCom schedules content and copywriting in weeks 3 to 6 of its 12; Phenomenon Studio gives content production 3–8 weeks, depending on volume and how complex the approvals are. In a redesign, content starts with a decision for every old page: keep, rewrite, merge or remove. That inventory grows with the site: a short list for 20 pages, a project of its own for 2,000.

Depends on: one owner per page, the old site's inventory, and whoever signs off claims, prices and legal wording.

Design: 4 to 12 weeks

Information architecture, wireframes and visual design. Clique Studios gives a mid-size site 1–2 weeks of architecture, 2–3 of wireframes and 3–4 of visual design; Huemor's creative phase runs 8–12 weeks. Phenomenon Studio says stakeholder review of the sitemap and navigation adds 1–2 weeks to the architecture phase on its own.

Depends on: final copy for the main pages, the number of unique templates, and how many people review each round. A rebrand running at the same time holds design until the identity is final.

Build: 2 to 12 weeks

Woods MarCom builds in weeks 8–10 of 12; Clique Studios gives a mid-size site 6–8 weeks of development, Solved Consulting 6–10 and Huemor 8–12. Content entry or migration overlaps the end of the build: 1–2 weeks at Clique Studios, 2–4 at Solved Consulting.

Depends on: approved designs, the CMS content model, API access and test accounts for every integration, and a redirect map that is ready before content entry ends.

QA and accessibility: 1 to 4 weeks

Clique Studios gives testing 2 weeks, Solved Consulting 2–3 and Huemor's pre-launch phase 2–4. That time covers phones and browsers, every form, analytics events, speed, redirects and an accessibility pass against WCAG 2.2 AA, the current W3C Recommendation (W3C). Accessibility is quicker to fix in components than on finished pages, so the QA weeks go faster when it was checked during design and build.

Depends on: a staging site with real content, the people who approve legal pages, and time set aside to fix what testing finds.

Launch: a day, with fixed waits around it

The switch itself is short: WordPress VIP's migration guide gives launch one day, Huemor one week. The waits around it are fixed. If hosting changes, Google advises lowering the DNS TTL "at least a week in advance of the move" (Google Search Central), and it suggests timing a move "to coincide with lower traffic, if possible" (Google Search Central). After launch, Google says crawling new or changed pages can take "a few days to a few weeks" (Google Search Central).

Depends on: the person who controls DNS and the registrar being available on launch day, and the redirect map shipping in the same release as the new site.

The 90-day watch

A redesign isn't finished at launch, because the data that judges it arrives late:

Old addresses linger even when every redirect works. After we retired 15 languages on dardo.studio on 14 October 2026, 35 of the 127 clicks the site got from Google between 15 October and 1 November still landed on the retired URLs; they reached a live page only because each had a 301 (migration SEO checklist). Plan reviews at 30, 60 and 90 days; the redesign checklist lists what to check at each.

Timeline by scope and phase

The published phase lengths, by scope. Phases overlap, so the rows add up to more than the totals at the bottom.

What stretches a redesign timeline

The same causes come up in every published schedule, and none of them is code:

If the domain changes too, two more clocks start. Search Console's Change of Address tool works for 180 days, Google asks you to keep the redirects at least that long, and it recommends paying for the old domain for at least a year (Search Console Help). If the redesign adds languages, see what website localization costs, route by route.

Redesign and platform change: one project or two?

Google's advice for big site changes is to sequence them: "Plan your changes to your site one after the other, not everything at the same time." If you're changing your CMS and your layout, it says to "do them one at a time" (Google Search Central). That way, if search traffic drops, you know which change caused it.

Sequencing doesn't have to mean two long projects. Platform vendors publish fast moves: Webflow says Backbase, whose site is now run by a team of two, migrated its entire website in 8 weeks against a fixed deadline (Webflow), and that its partner N4 moved Webflow's own site, more than 10,000 pages, in 11 weeks (Webflow). WordPress VIP says its migration service "takes around four weeks" for a WordPress-to-WordPress move (WordPress VIP), and its migration guide adds an optional 4–8+ weeks when the site is rebuilt (WordPress VIP). These are vendors' showcases: best cases with motivated teams, not averages.

Sequencing also keeps the search data readable. When we moved Gissi, a music school in Bogotá, to a new name and domain in October 2026, the plan was to ship the new name first and wait a week or two before switching domains. Both shipped on 23 October, less than two hours apart; each passed its checks, but the search data can't separate the effect of the new name from that of the new domain (how we moved the domain). If you can afford the wait between changes, take it. Our website migration planner shows which old URLs keep their path on the new platform and which need a 301, before the new site exists. Whether to change platform at all is its own decision: our guide to website replatforming covers the signals, the business case and the risks.

How to shorten a redesign without cutting corners

1. Export the baseline in week one. Start the Search Console bulk export the same day. It's a small task, and nothing done later recovers data that has aged out.
2. Decide every old URL early. Keep URLs wherever the new structure allows; each one you keep is a redirect you don't have to write, test or wait on. Our redirect map generator does the first pass from two sitemaps.
3. Write the main pages' copy before visual design. Late content is the delay Phenomenon Studio puts a number on: 3 to 6 weeks.
4. Name one decision-maker and a review turnaround. Agree on a number of business days per review, and send one consolidated set of comments per round.
5. Cut unique templates. Reuse a small set of page types and build each component once.
6. Request integration access at kickoff. API keys, sandbox accounts and a contact at each vendor, before the build needs them.
7. Book legal, brand and compliance reviews at kickoff, with the date each one's input is due.
8. Release in phases. Ship the pages that sell first. The resource archive, a second language or the platform move can follow as separate releases, which is also what Google's one-change-at-a-time advice suggests.
9. Keep the 90-day watch. It costs little time and catches the redirects, forms and tracking a rushed launch misses.

Before you ask for a schedule

A schedule is only as good as the scope behind it. Write down the page count and templates, who writes the content, the integrations, whether URLs, platform or domain change, and who approves each phase. Then send the same brief to every studio so their timelines are comparable. Our website brief and RFP builder puts that on one document, and our guide to comparing design studios covers what to check when the proposals come back.

Dardo doesn't quote a standard redesign timeline: we set the schedule in the proposal after the content inventory, once templates, integrations and migration work are visible. If you'd like us to plan yours, see website redesign, or website migration if the platform or domain changes too.