How Long Does a Stone Business Website Redesign Take
The most common answer to ‘how long will this take?’ is ‘it depends’ – which isn’t very useful. A more honest answer for a stone business website redesign: somewhere between 6 weeks and 5 months, depending on scope, your team’s availability, and how prepared you are going in.
Here’s a realistic breakdown of what the timeline looks like and what affects it.
Discovery and Planning: 1-2 Weeks
This phase covers understanding your business objectives, auditing the existing site, agreeing on the scope of the redesign, and creating a content and page structure plan. If you’ve done a proper pre-redesign audit before engaging a designer, this phase goes faster.
Businesses that arrive at this phase without a clear idea of their target buyers, their key pages, or their content requirements often need more time here. Clarity upfront saves weeks later.
Design Phase: 2-4 Weeks
Homepage and key interior pages are designed first, usually as mockups or prototypes. You’ll typically get two rounds of revisions. The more specific your brief – with examples of sites you like and a clear understanding of your brand – the faster this moves.
Where redesigns stall: unclear feedback (‘I’m not sure, it just doesn’t feel right’), multiple internal stakeholders with conflicting opinions, and scope creep (adding new requirements mid-phase). All of these are common in stone businesses where several people have a stake in the website.
Development Phase: 3-6 Weeks
Once designs are approved, the site is built. For a stone business with a product catalog, this involves setting up the CMS structure, building product templates, and populating content. The larger your catalog and the more complex your content requirements, the longer this takes.
API integrations (inventory systems, CRM), custom features, or multilingual requirements all add time. Keep these to what’s genuinely needed for launch, and plan additional features for phase two.
Content Population: Often the Biggest Delay
The phase that most commonly causes redesign delays: getting content into the new site. Product descriptions, updated photography, team bios, project case studies — these all need to exist before launch.
If you’re relying on internal teams to produce or source this content, set clear deadlines early and track them. Content delays are the single most common reason stone business website redesigns slip past their intended launch date.
Testing and Launch: 1-2 Weeks
Before going live, the site should be tested across browsers and devices, all forms should be verified, redirects should be confirmed, and a basic SEO check should be completed. Then there’s the DNS changeover and launch itself.
Build in time for post-launch fixes. There are almost always small issues that emerge once the site is live and real users start navigating it.
What Speeds Things Up
Having all product photography ready before the project starts. Having a clear and agreed decision-maker. Having a completed audit and content plan before design begins. Limiting scope to essentials for launch.
Businesses that come prepared can complete a solid redesign in 6-8 weeks. Businesses that treat the redesign as the moment to finalize their strategy, gather photography, and agree on brand direction typically take 4-5 months.
