How long does it actually take to build a landing page?

Clients ask me this every week, usually after getting a quote from someone who said "about two months." Let me be honest about what actually takes time and what doesn't.

What actually takes time

Here's a real hour log from a landing page I shipped last month — a single-page site for a Coral Gables realty office:

• Discovery call (1 hour) — Talk to the client, understand the business, get their goals.
• Strategy doc (2 hours) — Write down the target visitor, the one promise the page is making, the call-to-action.
• Wireframe (3 hours) — Sketch the section order, the hero, the trust signals, the form placement.
• Copy (6 hours) — Write the headline, sub-headline, every section's body copy, the form labels, the CTA microcopy.
• Visual design (8 hours) — Pick fonts, colors, build the look-and-feel, design every section in detail.
• Build / code (10 hours) — Convert the design into actual HTML/CSS/JS, mobile-first, responsive at every breakpoint.
• Photos and assets (2 hours) — Source or shoot real photos, optimize them.
• Integrations (1 hour) — Hook up the form to Formspree, set up Google Analytics, install schema.org markup.
• QA across devices (2 hours) — Test on iPhone, Android, iPad, desktop Chrome/Safari/Firefox.
• Deploy + DNS (1 hour) — Push to Vercel, point the domain, set up SSL.
• Client revisions (4 hours) — Two rounds of "can we change the headline" and "make the button bigger."

That's 40 hours of focused work for a project that ended up shipping 12 calendar days after kickoff. The calendar gap isn't laziness — it's waiting for the client to send photos, approve copy, and review the staging link.

What doesn't take time

The myth that big-agency timelines exist because the work is hard is mostly a myth. What 8-week agency quotes actually include:

• 2 weeks of "discovery" that's mostly billable meetings with junior account managers.
• 1 week of "strategy" that produces a slide deck nobody on the build team reads.
• 2 weeks of "design" where 3 different designers each touch the file once.
• 2 weeks of "development" that's actually 1 week of work and 1 week of waiting for code review.
• 1 week of "QA + launch" that's a single afternoon stretched into a billing event.

A solo designer who knows what they're doing collapses all of that into the actual work hours. You're not paying for fewer features — you're cutting out coordination overhead that exists to feed a 12-person company.

The agency 8-week timeline is mostly billing structure. The actual website work is the same 40 hours.

My standard timeline

For a single landing page, here's what I quote:

• Day 0: Kickoff call (30 min). Strategy doc back same day.
• Day 1–2: First design draft sent. Client reviews.
• Day 3: Revisions applied.
• Day 4–6: Build phase. Staging link sent on day 6.
• Day 7–9: Client reviews staging, sends second round of feedback. Polish.
• Day 10: Final QA across devices.
• Day 11–14: Launch on the client's domain, DNS propagation, monitoring.

Faster than this means cutting corners. Slower than this — for a single landing page — means somebody is padding.

When it actually takes longer

To be fair, some projects legitimately take 4–8 weeks. Here's when:

• Multi-page sites with content systems. A 6-page services site with a blog backend is real work — 3–4 weeks is fair.
• Custom integrations. Booking systems, payment processors, custom CRM hooks each add a few days.
• E-commerce. Even a small Shopify store with custom theming is 3–5 weeks minimum.
• You don't have copy or photos. If we need to write copy from scratch AND do a photo shoot, expect 2 extra weeks calendar time.
• Slow client feedback. If you take a week to respond to a staging link, the timeline triples and that's on you.

How to speed it up from your end

Most of the time, the client is the bottleneck. Things you can prep before kickoff that compress the timeline by 30–50%:

• Have a folder of real photos ready (10–15 of your work, your team, your space).
• Write a one-paragraph "who we are and what we sell" in plain English.
• List 3 competitor sites you like and 2 you hate, with one sentence on why.
• Have your domain already purchased and DNS access ready.
• Make a list of every place the new site needs to integrate with — booking, payment, CRM, email tool — with login credentials handy.

Show up with these and a competent designer ships you a real landing page in 7 days. No exceptions.