Most B2B website redesigns take longer than expected, not because of design or build, but because of stakeholder sign-off, legal review and content that nobody has written yet. This post gives you a realistic schedule, phase by phase, for firms in capital-intensive industries.
# Website redesign timelines for complex B2B projects
Ask ten web agencies how long a redesign takes. You will get ten different answers, most of them too short. The agencies quoting four to six weeks are building brochure sites for simple businesses. If your firm operates in energy, shipping, property development or construction, your project has more moving parts than that.
This post breaks down each phase, what actually happens inside it and where projects stall. Use it to set expectations internally before you brief anyone.
---
Discovery: weeks one to three.
Discovery is not a kick-off call. It is the phase where you figure out what the site needs to do, who it needs to convince and what currently gets in the way.
Deliverables at the end of this phase typically include a goals document, audience map, competitive review, information architecture and a clear brief for design. For firms with multiple service lines or geographic markets, expect discovery to take the full three weeks. Cutting it short is the single most reliable way to produce a site you will want to rebuild in eighteen months.
The hidden dependency here is internal access. Discovery requires time from senior people: business development, operations, often a director. If those people are travelling or project-side, schedules slip before design has even started.
We cover why this phase deserves its own budget line in Discovery is the deliverable.
---
Design: weeks three to seven.
Design runs in rounds. A typical B2B project has two rounds of wireframes and two rounds of visual design before anything is signed off. Each round requires structured feedback from the client side, not a group email thread.
The dependency that kills design timelines is unclear decision-making. If five people have veto power and no one has final say, feedback arrives in contradictory batches. Fix this before the project starts. Nominate one person who can approve design. Everyone else feeds into that person.
For firms in regulated or conservative industries, such as energy or environmental engineering, expect an additional legal or brand-compliance review pass. Build two weeks of buffer for this. It is not pessimism. It is accurate scheduling.
Firms in energy and petrochemical and shipping and maritime regularly have HSE, legal and comms teams who each need to sign off on messaging. That is not bureaucracy to work around. It is a real constraint to plan for.
---
Build: weeks six to twelve.
Build overlaps with late design stages on well-run projects. While final design is being approved, the development environment is being set up, integrations are being scoped and any third-party platforms are being connected.
Common integrations that add time:
- CRM connections (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive)
- Project enquiry or tender submission forms with routing logic
- Document libraries or gated content
- Video hosting and performance optimisation
- Analytics and tracking instrumentation
Testing is not a half-day task. A proper build phase includes cross-browser testing, mobile testing, load testing on large pages, form submission testing and accessibility checks. For firms with large asset libraries, property development and construction in particular, image and document management alone takes significant time.
If you are migrating from an existing site, allow time for URL mapping and redirect configuration. This is not optional if you have existing search visibility you want to keep.
---
Launch prep: weeks ten to fourteen.
Launch prep is where projects drag if it has not been planned for from week one. The main tasks are:
Content. Most firms underestimate how much content still needs writing or approving at this stage. Service descriptions, case studies, team pages and project galleries all require input from people who are not sitting at a desk waiting. Plan for content to be the last bottleneck and you will be right more often than not.
SEO migration. If the existing site ranks for anything, you need a redirect map, a post-launch crawl plan and baseline rankings captured before you flip the switch. Skipping this step costs organic traffic that can take months to recover.
Staging review. The site should be reviewed on staging by real stakeholders before launch. This is not the same as design approval. It is a final check that content reads correctly, forms work and nothing looks broken at scale.
DNS and hosting. For larger firms with IT departments, DNS changes require internal approval and scheduling. Allow a week for this process, not an afternoon.
For a detailed look at hosting decisions and what they mean for performance, see Where should your website live.
---
Post-launch: weeks fourteen to twenty and beyond.
Launch is not the finish line. The first four to six weeks after launch are when you learn whether the site actually works.
Post-launch priorities:
- Verify analytics are tracking correctly and that goals are firing
- Monitor Core Web Vitals and fix any performance issues surfaced by real traffic
- Review heatmaps and session recordings to see where users drop off
- Check search console for crawl errors and indexing issues
- Gather early feedback from sales and business development on lead quality
Optimisation is ongoing. A site that converts well in month three should convert better in month twelve if someone is paying attention to the data. That requires instrumentation built in from the start, not bolted on after the fact.
We cover the launch and measurement process in detail in The conversion-instrumented launch.
---
Realistic total timelines.
Here is a plain summary based on project complexity:
- Simple single-service firm, no integrations: ten to fourteen weeks
- Multi-service firm, one CRM integration, existing content: fourteen to eighteen weeks
- Multi-market firm, complex integrations, content to write, regulated industry: eighteen to twenty-four weeks
These figures assume a responsive client-side decision-maker and content delivered on schedule. Add four to six weeks to any of the above if content is being written from scratch or if multiple internal sign-off rounds are required.
---
What actually causes delays.
In order of frequency:
- Content not ready when build is complete
- Design feedback from multiple stakeholders without a single decision-maker
- IT or legal review not scheduled until late in the project
- Scope additions after design sign-off
- Hosting or DNS changes requiring internal IT approvals
None of these are the agency's fault and none of them are yours either. They are predictable. The firms that hit their launch dates are the ones that planned for these dependencies in week one, not week ten.
---
If you are starting to scope a project and want a view on what a realistic schedule looks like for your firm, book a call or take a look at our services.