How long a redesign takes across the industry
The honest answer to "how long does it take to redesign a website" depends entirely on which of four jobs you are actually commissioning. These are the durations you should expect from a conventional agency, from kick-off to launch, assuming the project is properly resourced on both sides.
| Type of project | Typical duration | What sets the pace |
|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh | 3 – 5 weeks | Design rounds. The structure and copy already exist, so there is little to wait for. |
| Full redesign, 15–30 pages | 8 – 16 weeks | Content production. Eight weeks if the writing and photography exist; twelve to sixteen if they have to be made. |
| Redesign and rebuild | 16 – 24 weeks | Migration and integration. Moving several hundred pages and connecting live systems is the long pole, not the design. |
| Multi-system project | 6 – 9 months | Approvals. Several audiences and stakeholders means every decision is a meeting, and the meetings are the schedule. |
What sixteen weeks is actually spent on
For a typical 15 to 30 page site run the conventional way, the shape looks like this. It is worth reading closely, because most of it is waiting rather than working.
- Weeks 1–2: diagnosis. Audit, analytics review, interviews, competitive analysis.
- Weeks 3–4: direction. Positioning, sitemap, message hierarchy, art direction.
- Weeks 5–9: design and content, running together rather than in sequence.
- Weeks 9–13: build, with design continuing on secondary templates.
- Weeks 13–15: quality assurance, redirects, analytics, accessibility and content loading.
- Week 16: launch, then a monitored fortnight.
Why Kordan runs two to four weeks
Read the sixteen-week schedule again and note how little of it is production. Two weeks of diagnosis before anything is drawn, a fortnight lost to each approval round, and a middle section whose length is set by how quickly copy and photographs arrive from somewhere else. The design and the build are the short part.
Kordan removes the waiting rather than compressing the work. The diagnosis happens in the free review, before the project starts and before the clock does, so week one opens on direction rather than on an audit. The writing, art direction, design and build sit with one studio and one person deciding, so nothing is handed across a gap and nothing queues behind a supplier. Scope is fixed to one figure before the start, which is what stops the mid-project additions described below.
The shape of the shorter project:
- Before the clock starts: the free review does the diagnosis – audit, analytics, the argument for what should change.
- Week 1: direction and the first templates. Positioning, sitemap, message hierarchy, art direction.
- Weeks 1–3: design, writing and build running together rather than in sequence.
- Final week: quality assurance, redirects, analytics, accessibility and content loading.
- Launch, then a monitored fortnight – the same as any other project.
The four causes of nearly every delay
After enough projects the pattern is consistent, and none of the four is a design problem.
Content is the first and largest. A client who agrees to supply copy in week three and delivers in week eleven has moved the launch by eight weeks, not by the two they think, because everything downstream was queued behind it.
The second is approval structure. If six people must agree and none can decide, every round takes a fortnight regardless of how quickly the work is produced.
The third is photography, which depends on weather, season, occupancy and availability. It cannot be compressed by spending more, and it is the one item that can strand an otherwise finished site.
The fourth is scope added mid-project. Each addition is small and reasonable; collectively they are neither.
How to protect the date
Four commitments do more for a launch date than any amount of project management software.
- Name one decision-maker with genuine authority, and let them decide.
- Agree that content is produced within the project rather than supplied to it.
- Book photography before the design starts, not after.
- Agree that anything new goes on a post-launch list rather than into the current scope.
Can it be done faster?
Yes, when there is a genuine reason – a funding announcement, an opening, a rebrand with a fixed date. Compression works by reducing scope, not by working harder: launch the essential pages properly and add the rest afterwards.
What does not work is skipping the diagnosis. Everything built on an unexamined assumption has to be revisited, which reliably costs more than the time saved. Moving that diagnosis earlier – doing it before the project starts, as Kordan does in the free review – is a different thing from leaving it out.
How long before a redesign shows results?
Separate the launch from the return, because they are on different clocks. A well-executed redesign should hold its existing search performance through launch week – that is what the redirect mapping is for – and show conversion changes within the first month, because those depend on the pages themselves.
Search and AI discovery move more slowly. New pages need to be crawled, indexed and then trusted, which typically takes one to three months to begin showing and longer to settle. A studio that promises ranking movement in week two is describing something other than how indexing works.
What happens after launch
Launch is a threshold, not an ending. The fortnight afterwards should be actively monitored: search performance against the old URLs, form submissions actually arriving, analytics recording correctly, and real user behaviour against what the design assumed.
Most of the value of a redesign is realised in the months after launch, through publishing and measurement. Plan for that period before you reach it.