Has anyone given you a straight answer about how long your website redesign will take?
The usual response is a range wide enough to be useless. Three to six months. It depends. Somewhere between eight weeks and next year. That vagueness isn't always evasion. Most of the variance in a redesign timeline has nothing to do with the agency's speed, and everything to do with a handful of decisions that get made, or avoided, in the first two weeks.
The honest answer
A B2B website redesign for an established company runs six to eight weeks from kickoff to launch when the content is being written by the people building the site. That's our own build window, and it holds because we write the copy rather than sending a spreadsheet of empty cells to a client who already has a job.
The projects that stretch to four and five months are almost never stuck in design or development. They are waiting on words.
Where the weeks go in a website redesign timeline
Weeks one and two: diagnosis and positioning. What the site needs to say, to whom, and what it has to prove. This is the phase people are most tempted to compress, and compressing it is the single most reliable way to make the project late. Every unresolved question here becomes a revision round later, when changing it costs ten times more.
Weeks three to five: content and design together. Pages get written and designed as pages, not as copy poured into a template afterward. You review real pages rather than a wireframe you have to imagine your way into.
Weeks six to eight: build, migration and launch. The build is the most predictable part of the whole project. What makes this stretch is migration work that wasn't planned in week one: the redirect map, the URL inventory, the ranking baseline. Those are project management, not engineering, and they're the difference between a launch and a traffic cliff.
The four things that actually make a redesign late
Nobody owns the decision. If approvals need three people who are rarely in the same room, add weeks. Not because the work is slow, but because the work stops. The most useful thing you can do before kickoff is name one person who can say yes.
The content is the client's job. This is the big one. An agency that hands you a content template has moved the critical path onto the person with the least time. Ask directly who writes the copy, and treat "we'll collaborate on it" as meaning you.
Scope arrives late. The integration that surfaced in week five. The eleven product pages that turned out to be forty. Both are discoverable in week one if anyone looks.
Approval happens at the end. If the first time leadership sees the work is the week before launch, you aren't reviewing, you're re-doing. Milestone reviews exist so the expensive surprise happens while it's still cheap.
What the delay costs while you wait
The instinct is to treat a slipping timeline as an inconvenience. It's a little worse than that, because the site you have is still working the whole time.
When we analysed more than 55,000 US B2B websites, 49% were visibly dated, with a median last redesign more than seven years ago. Every additional month is another month of buyers forming their first impression from the page you already decided wasn't good enough. We wrote about that compounding in every quarter you put off the rebuild, the rebuild gets bigger.
A test you can run before you sign anything
Ask a prospective agency two questions and listen for specifics.
Who writes the content, and what happens if we're slow? A firm that has thought about this has an answer involving interviews and drafts. A firm that hasn't will say something about a collaborative process.
What is on the critical path in week one? If the answer is design, the migration work is going to surface late. If the answer involves URL inventory and positioning, they've done this before.
Neither question is about speed. Both predict it better than any number in a proposal.
