Process
What delays a website project most often?
Content, by a wide margin. Copy nobody has written and photography nobody has taken hold up more projects than any technical problem. The second cause is approval — one person who must see everything, and who is travelling.
The causes, in order of how often they bite
- Content not ready on day one, with no named owner or deadline
- Approval bottlenecks, where feedback needs several people to agree
- Scope added mid-build without a corresponding change to the date
- Third-party integrations whose documentation turns out to be wrong
- Access not granted — domain, hosting or payment gateway credentials
Why content is the reliable culprit
Design and build are estimable because the same person does them repeatedly. Copy is usually the client’s to supply, is harder than it looks, and gets scheduled around a working week that was already full. Weeks disappear here quietly.
The paragraph that protects the date
Agree the content deadline before the build starts, name who owns each piece, and state in writing what happens to the launch date if it slips. That single clause resolves more schedule disputes than any project management tool.
The longer version
This answer is deliberately short. If you want the full treatment, How much does a website cost, and what drives the number? covers it in about 4 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who answered this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan — fifteen live client sites, six of them stores taking real payments. These answers come from those projects rather than from a content brief. More about how I work, or ask me something directly.