How Long Does it REALLY take to Design a B2B Website?

Let’s jump into this realistically - the length of time it takes to design a website has so many variables attached to it that it’s impossible to estimate. Stakeholder input, CMS hiccups and limitations and never-ending copywriting are things that ultimately delay getting your new website design from point A, to point B. As marketers, it can be frustrating when management asks you for timelines and tries to understand when they can expect the new website to go live.

However, I want to answer this another way - a way that’s slightly different to the articles currently out there and showcases a real project we completed from start to finish, and how long it took to design and develop that website.

Enter Makers.



They help businesses build ‘AI-confident tech teams’ through upskilling and apprenticeship programmes, ultimately pairing candidates with their dream company. We supported Makers on the design, development and launch of their new website - having a hand in the development throughout. They had the further requirement to migrate to HubSpot CMS from their existing content management system. Below, is how long it really took to design their website

If you need more proof

We follow this playbook and timeline every time we complete a website project. See some other examples below.

TL;DR: How Long Does it Take to Design a Website?

From project inception to delivery, a website takes roughly 6 months to complete. At least, it did in this use case.

Using this timeline and with the planning stages, then the design and build stages, not to mention all of the technical work included, you’re looking at a large chunk of your day being taken up, every day, every week, for around half a year.

• The aspects that dictate how long it takes to design a website are:
• How much research do you conduct beforehand for SEO, redirects, user journeys etc?
• How long it takes to write the content and how many amendments it has to go through?
• How long it takes to design the website and how many amendments it has to go through?
• The length of time it takes to develop the signed-off design and copy.
• The time it takes to fully upload the site - for example, if you have a one-page site, then it will take considerably less time than a 100-page website.

All of this needs to be taken into account when presenting timelines, results and ROI for a new website project as these aspects can considerably slow down your website.

On our specific use case, it’s worth mentioning that there were some variables attached to this project which made it more complicated than the average website design or if you were doing it in-house.

These include:

• The size - they wanted a complete design of their existing website rather than prioritising specific pages to launch faster.
• HubSpot CMS Migration - they weren’t existing HubSpot partners but wanted to be onboarded onto the software.
• Client Management - as part of an ongoing service-level agreement, we met with Makers frequently to discuss updates on the project.

This isn’t to say that 6 months is the standard for all businesses. We’ve seen websites launched in as little as 3 months using our timeline - but also as long as 12 months such as in the case with our website.

However, one way that B2B businesses can get around the long time frames of a traditional website design project is to utilise the Growth-Driven Design (GDD) approach.

This is a little different from the traditional website design process, as it focuses less on having the whole ‘finished package’ and more on creating an MVP of a site that you can build on gradually. The idea is to focus more on data than on creating something that looks good to maximise traffic, conversions, and, ultimately, leads.

For a GDD project, you’re looking at around 2 months to get your new site live depending on how big your MVP website is.

Let’s dig deeper into what the website design and development timeline looks like and what you need to complete at each stage of the process.

Step 1: Research - 3 Weeks

The first step to undertake is to conduct thorough research for your new website - and this goes beyond simply looking at what your competitors have.

This, for our project with Makers, took our team 3 weeks to complete this section of designing a B2B website.

Aside from our standard kick-off and discovery sessions with the client, the research phase of your project should include:

SEO Research

Arguably one of the most important steps of any website design project. After all, the website could be beautiful, have the best copywriting and run faster than Usain Bolt, but if your prospects can’t discover it on Google or other search engines, all that work goes to waste.

At this stage, you should be doing extensive keyword research and looking for:

• In-Market Keywords - these are keywords that your prospects are searching for when they’re looking for a solution similar to yours. For example, for Makers, their ‘DevOps’ service page ranks for the keyword “devops apprenticeship”. A way to see this, using a keyword research tool like AhRefs, would be to filter for ‘Commercial’ intent keywords.

• Keyword Gaps - these are keywords that your competitors are ranking for and seeing if you can outrank them and if they’re relevant to your offering.

You should map this out for each of your homepage, service pages and any other pages you have in the main navigation or footer of your website. This ensures that, when you come to write your pages, you have some guidance in terms of what you should be writing about and the intent of the person that is viewing that page from when they searched.

Three-Way Competitor Analysis

This step helps you solidify your positioning in your market and allows you to reflect honestly on how your solution marries up against your competitors.

We do this using our three-way competitor analysis framework. In this framework, we take service areas and their importance to the ideal buyer and pitch them against three competitors and, through a calculation, score your services against your competitors to see where potential USPs are and what information to prioritise when crafting wireframes down the line.

For Makers, as an education and placement provider, we chose the following service areas and rated their importance to the customer (out of 5):

• Reputation/hiring potential
• Community/Experience
• Price
• Quality of trainers
• Curriculum
• Choice of curriculum
• Speed of delivery
• Quality of support

This was pitted against three other competitors to uncover the unique proposition that Makers offered against their competitors, and how we could present that USP in the website.

This section is often overlooked as, truthfully, most businesses aren’t transparent with where the pitfalls in their solution are.

They like to believe that their solution is uniformly better than their competitors and can’t prioritise messaging, leading to information overload as they try and state all the reasons they’re the best. Consequently, this usually dilutes the key USP they’re trying to promote as they’re not focusing on the problem they solve better than anyone else.

One way that you can see this through qualitative data is by reviewing your closed won/lost data that your sales team should be inputting. This will give you clear indications about why your customer did or didn’t choose your solution over a competitor and will make it easier to fill out the template.

Analytics Analysis

You need to look at your existing website and understand what the current user behaviours and acquisition channels are. If you don’t know where your existing customers are coming from and what they’re doing, you don’t know how best to optimise their user journey for when you come to design the new website.

As part of your KPI reporting, you should already be monitoring traffic levels and conversion rates, but as part of this section of website research, dive deeper into areas such as:

• High-intent pages - Pages where your audience members need to complete a high-intent action to learn more about your solution (Pricing pages, Contact etc.). Do they convert well? How often do these leads turn into customers? Answering these questions should dictate how much of a priority these pages are and how important they are to the buyer's journey.
• Sources - Understanding where your audience is coming from. Are they coming from search engines and organic search? Or are they coming from referral sources? Knowing this will help your prior SEO research as, by digging into buyer behaviour on your site, you can understand which pages are driving customers and what keywords those pages are ranking for to help strategise your website.
• Audience Behaviour - Knowing what your audience is doing once they reach your site. Do they bounce after one page? Are certain important pages not driving people to where you want them to go? If not, then reevaluate your information architecture and understand the block between reading your page, and converting.
• User Experience - Going hand-in-hand with the previous point, review the user experience on your current site to see where people are getting frustrated or where they stop reading the information on your page. This helps you analyse where your existing audience is dropping off and avoid that in your new website design.

User Journey Mapping Per Page

User journeys refer to the paths users take to reach their goals when navigating a website, and are used in the design process to identify all the possible ways a user may move around a site while defining the best way for them to reach their goal as quickly as possible.

These are especially useful when planning out the next research step - your sitemap. User journeys help you understand how your customers navigate your site and how you can make it easier for them to convert further down the funnel. Ultimately, it gives you a good indication of how your website should work and what functionality is needed to help users navigate more efficiently.

Building your website around the user journey ensures confidence in the final product, knowing it meets your objectives. It also serves as a valuable reference point if the design starts to drift off course - making your website design and development take less time.

You should build these journeys out page by page as, when people are looking at different solutions you offer, they don’t have the same journeys and expectations of what they desire. This is why this is so important to pair up with buyer personas because that way, you can match the content you want to promote to the expectations, interests and challenges of your ideal buyer.

Sitemap

The next step, once you have accrued all this research, is to begin building the skeleton of what your website will look like.

A sitemap is a roadmap of your website, providing a breakdown of all the pages it contains. It should show:

• The name of your page
• The template that page uses
• The URL and Slug
• The primary and secondary keywords that the page is targeting (Alongside its volume and competitiveness)
• The page’s content is mapped out in the user journeys and also the questions that need to be answered on those pages.
• Any notes
• A directory of all the documents related to those pages including design, copy, briefs etc.
  Any more resources required for that page

This will give you a structured overview of the website you’re about to design and also a hierarchy in terms of pages and where they sit in the broader view of the website.

Redirecting Strategy

The final step of the research stage is to create a redirect strategy from pages that will be unpublished with your new website design.

Ultimately, B2B website design should ‘trim the fat’ of your existing site and breathe new life into the content that is prioritised based on your prior research. In all new website projects, there should be pages that are unpublished but you need to consider where people will go if they unexpectedly land on those pages.

A redirect strategy ensures that if by any chance someone lands on a page that was previously on your website, they will redirect to the relevant page on your new website design. This means you can put them on the right path based on their user journey and ensure that they don’t exit your new site with a poor experience.

Step 2: Copywriting (9 Weeks)

The next step is to begin writing. The overall process for copywriting is hard to determine as this is usually where there are a lot of amendments and opinions for what should be prioritised.

For the Makers project, this took us 9 weeks to complete. It’s important to note, however, that this includes a 2-week break due to holidays and a week for the client to review the content.

Taking this into account, this can take you as little as 4 weeks or as long as 12 depending on:

• The number of pages in your sitemap
• The depth of copy on each page
• Stakeholder sign-off
• Any amendment rounds

The good news is that you’ve done your research prior which should make copywriting easier. Prioritising your user journeys for each page and meshing that with your SEO research, you should be writing copy that is specifically tailored to your audience.

Every page should have a user journey that you can lean upon to write your content in a structured way. This will allow you to write for the intent of the page (whether it be information or commercial) and marry that up to the SEO and keyword research to craft effective website pages.

Why Should You Do Copywriting Before Design?

Being wholly transparent here - I didn’t really agree with this before undertaking a website project. However, writing before designing is the way to go.

A lot of people flip this and choose the design first; and for good reason. With a design mapped out first, you can write to a design structure and ensure that your copy can ‘fit’ to the design specifications.

However, the key word there is ‘fit’. The truth is, no matter how pretty your website is, the copy, narrative and unique positioning of your business is what people care about.

By focusing on the copy first, you make sure you have everything important to your target audience ‘on paper’, marrying the words up to the user journeys. This then ensures that you're prioritising the content and solving your audience’s pains first and foremost - the design, therefore, should ‘fit’ around the copy.

Late in 2024, we updated our website using this exact timeframe and playbook. We wrote the copy (over an albeit long period) and, following that, worked with our in-house user experience team to wireframe and design around this principle. The result led to a much more cohesive website design and a website which resonated much more with our audience as opposed to when we mocked designs up before writing the copy.

Step 3: UX, UI and Website Design (5 Weeks)

In total, excluding any client communications and admin time, the design process took us 5 weeks to complete.

Again, depending on the amount of templates and individual web page designs you have to do, this could be a shorter or longer amount of time. It’s important to remember that some pages, like service and landing pages, don’t need separate designs for each iteration of that page. You can simply design a template that you can develop into your CMS and reuse.

We split this step into two phases:

• User Experience (UX) and Wireframing - This is what should be completed following the copywriting step. We find it best to get both your copywriter and UX designer in one room to discuss the copy and how best to wireframe the copy into a cohesive web page which meets the expectations of your audience. A wireframe should just be the bare bones of a web page, purely showing where everything should sit and how it should function.
• User Interface (UI) and Website Design - Getting creative is the second part of this process. As part of this, you should take the wireframes thought up by the UX designer and, in a couple of words, make it ‘look pretty’. This is where you can take your branding elements and colours and put the ‘skin’ on the wireframe, making it into something that aids user experience but also inspires your audience to take action.

As you can probably tell, collaboration is the key to a successful B2B website design. Your copy team should work alongside your UX designers who should, in turn, collaborate with your design department to create the perfect website.

For the Makers project specifically, we divided our design sprints into three phases:

• Phase 1: Home Page - Being the first page that the majority of your audience will land on upon coming to your site, this is arguably the most important page. Furthermore, this allows you to set the style and ‘vibe’ for the rest of the website, without designing the whole thing and being told it isn’t right.
• Phase 2: Important Journey Pages - This includes pages that are important on the user journey if they are to convert. Pages such as service, sector, and contact pages would be included in this phase. These pages should lean on the feedback from the home page and follow the styles set in the first phase of design.
• Phase 3: Tertiary Pages - This is for the extra page templates that need doing. This phase is reserved for any specific pages that need designing that weren’t service, sector or contact specific but still need to be done for the launch of the website.

As mentioned, take our timeline with a pinch of salt. Throughout the whole process, there will be feedback from stakeholders (both good and bad) which will alter how long it takes to design your B2B website.

Step 4: Development and Upload (7 Weeks)

The total development time for this project was 7 weeks.

Breaking this timeline down, the timelines you can expect are:

• Design files and navigation - 1 week
• Module development (if using HubSpot) and system page development - 5 weeks
• Snagging and optimisation - 1-2 weeks

Again, this is totally dependent on several factors including skill level, capacity and the complexity of functionality and website.

Your development team should have the necessary wireframes, design and copy to take the website into a staging site, readying for launch. Before launching, make sure all your research from before is in your work stream, such as your redirecting strategy.

Snagging is also an important step that people usually put off. Whilst snagging, you should ensure:

• Your website is responsive and functions on all devices
• There are no modules that don’t work or don’t function properly

You should also consider page speed and accessibility within this section of the build. Tools such as Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and GTMetrix help you pass Core Web Vitals and any accessibility checks. Most keyword research tools such as SEMRush and AhRefs also offer site audit tools, ensuring there are no errors on your site such as 404’s or duplicate pages.

Moving Forward

As we’ve shown, a good B2B website should take 6 months to complete (give or take a couple of months). And, after spending that amount of time, your website shouldn’t sit there, never to be touched again.

We always tell our clients to keep reviewing the data from their website, from the amount of traffic to the exit rates on specific pages, to see where people are dropping out of the ‘funnel’ and never returning. This should be done on a monthly, ongoing basis to continue optimising and making the most of your B2B website design.

Curious about how much a high-performing B2B website should cost? Download our Pricing Guide to see what’s included and what to expect at different investment levels.