A founder asked us recently: "Can you have the landing page live in two weeks?"
The honest answer is no. The longer answer is in this post.
Two-week landing pages exist. Plenty of studios ship them. We've seen them. They tend to share a few traits: a familiar look, a stock structure, copy that could be lifted into any other startup's site with three find-and-replace operations. They are templates with new colours. That is the only way the math works.
The math of two weeks
Pick any landing page project and you can break it into stages. We use four:
- Talk — figure out what the page is actually trying to do and for whom.
- Sketch — wireframe and message before any visuals.
- Design — visual direction, copy, the page as a finished artefact.
- Build — hand-coded, deployed, measured.
In two weeks, here's what fits:
- Talk: half a day if the brief is sharp.
- Sketch: two to three days, parallel with talk.
- Design: five days, one revision cycle, very compressed.
- Build: five days, including QA on real devices.
Add it up: roughly 13 days end to end if nothing slips. No buffer. No second revision cycle. No time to test the page against actual visitors before it goes live.
In practice, things slip. Stakeholders are slow to send brand assets. Copy comes back with edits the day before launch. Analytics aren't wired up because that's a "post-launch" item. The page ships, but it ships in a state that two more days would have caught.
What gets skipped
The two-week page is a real artefact. It loads, it has a CTA, it converts. But certain things get cut and you can see them if you know where to look:
The message hasn't been tested. It came from the founder's head, got polished by the studio, and shipped. Whether actual prospects read it the same way the founder reads it is unknown. You'll find out in production.
The decision path isn't pressure-tested. We talked about this in the CRO checklist — the order in which questions get answered matters more than any individual section. Compressing the schedule means the order didn't get audited. It's usually wrong on the first pass.
The post-click experience is an afterthought. "We'll do the sign-up flow next sprint." The landing page is honest about what happens next, except it isn't, because next hasn't been built.
Performance is "we'll optimise later." The page loads in 4 seconds on a mid-range phone because there wasn't time to set up image optimisation, code splitting, or font preloading. That's a 50% bounce-rate penalty on mobile that nobody saw coming.
None of these are catastrophic in isolation. Together they're the difference between a page that converts 4% of qualified traffic and one that converts 7%. Multiply that across the lifetime of the page and you've spent a year recovering from two weeks you saved at the start.
A project that ran on the longer clock
A few months back we built a landing page for a B2B tool launch. The founder wanted four weeks. We took three and a half.
In week one we did the brief. Half of what came out of that conversation was the founder telling us what they thought the audience cared about. The other half was us pushing back: "Why do you think they care about X? What evidence do you have?" By the end of the week the message had moved. Not entirely — the founder was mostly right. But three of the headline drafts we'd been considering got cut, and a fourth that wasn't on the list ended up being the one.
Week two: wireframes, decision path audit, copy in a Google Doc. The whole page worked end to end in greyscale before anyone picked a colour. We caught two ordering bugs (the pricing section was answering "what's the catch" before "is this for me") and the FAQ was carrying too much weight, signalling that the upper sections weren't doing their job.
Week three: visual design, content shaping, one full revision cycle. The founder pushed back on the hero treatment, we pushed back on a fancy animation idea, we landed on a middle path that loaded fast and felt right.
Week three and a half: build, deploy, instrument. The page launched on a Tuesday. Conversion rate came in at 6.8% on the first cohort, above the founder's target of 5%.
Could we have done it in two? Probably. Would the page have hit 6.8%? Not a chance.
What we do with the extra time
The third week is where the real work happens. It's not bonus polish. It's the only week you can:
- Test the message against people who aren't on the project. Send the wireframe to three users and ask them to summarise it. If they get it wrong, the message is wrong.
- Audit the decision path top to bottom and reorder if needed. Often this means moving a section from page-bottom to page-middle. You can't do that in week one because the sections don't exist yet.
- Build the post-click experience as a real flow, not a stub. The CTA goes somewhere that matches what it promised.
- Set up analytics, error tracking, and the post-launch monitoring that lets you tell whether the page is working before you've burned your ad budget.
This work is invisible in the deliverable. It's the difference between a launch and a launched product.
Why it costs more
A three-to-four-week landing page costs more than a two-week one. Not because we're slow, but because the extra week is real work. Real revisions. Real testing. Real engineering effort on the post-click flow.
We've thought about offering a two-week tier. We don't, because every two-week project we've ever quoted has come back asking for two more weeks of fixes once it was live. The cumulative time was longer than the slower path, and the page was worse.
If your only constraint is speed — you have a campaign that launches Friday and the landing page must be live by Thursday — we're not the right studio. There are studios that ship that work. They're honest about what they're doing: they have a template, they swap your text in, you launch. That's a legitimate service. It's just not what we do.
When you'd come to us instead
You'd come to us if:
- The page has to convert, not just exist. Performance against a goal matters more than launch date.
- The product or service is differentiated and the page needs to communicate that without sounding like every other startup site.
- You want the page to keep working. We stay on after launch to iterate based on real traffic.
If that's the brief, see how we work on landing pages. Three to four weeks. One revision cycle. A page that converts because it earned the right to.