Almost every business that commissions a website is told a number of weeks at the start, and almost every one of them launches later than that number. The reason is rarely that developers work slowly.

A website project has two tracks running in parallel: the build, which an agency controls, and the decisions, which the client controls. Copy, photography, legal sign-off, product data and stakeholder approvals all sit on the second track.

Understanding which delays belong to which track is the difference between a project that lands on time and one that quietly drifts by two months.

Content that does not exist yet. Design can proceed with placeholder text, but the moment real copy arrives the layout changes, and every page needs revisiting. Writing the content before design begins is the single largest time saving available on a website project.

Approval chains nobody mapped at kickoff. If four people need to sign off on the homepage and no one scheduled that review, the project stops for as long as it takes them to find a shared hour.

Scope added mid-build. A booking system, a payment gateway or a multilingual version added in week five is not an adjustment. It is a second project running inside the first one, and it deserves its own timeline.