The realistic answer: most sites are live 2–3 weeks after the initial questionnaire - and your old site stays online the entire time, so the actual switchover is a five-minute domain change at the end. That's the managed-service timeline. DIY rebuilds routinely stretch to three or four months of evenings, and traditional agency projects run 8–16 weeks. This post lays out the week-by-week reality of the WorkspaceCMS process, exactly what you provide versus what the team does, and the short list of things that genuinely add time.
Why "How Long" Has Three Different Answers
Ask how long a platform switch takes and you'll hear anything from a weekend to half a year - because the answer depends entirely on whose hours are doing the work and how many people are waiting on each other.
The DIY path is unbounded: rebuilding your own site on a new builder happens in the margins of running your business, which is why so many DIY migrations stall at 80% for months. The agency path is bounded but long: 8–16 weeks is normal, driven by discovery phases, multiple stakeholder review cycles, and the agency's own project queue. The managed path is short and bounded - 2–3 weeks - because a dedicated team does the work in parallel with your live site, the review process is structured as a single consolidated round, and migration is a repeatable production process rather than a bespoke project. When a team has moved hundreds of sites, the timeline stops being a guess.
There's also a hidden fourth answer worth naming: the migration that never finishes. Every web professional has seen it - the half-rebuilt site sitting on a staging URL for a year while the live site ages, because the person responsible for finishing it is also the person responsible for running the business. Unbounded timelines aren't just slow; they're where migrations go to die. A fixed process with someone else accountable for each phase is as much about certainty as speed.
The Week-by-Week Timeline
Here's the actual WorkspaceCMS schedule from signup to live, including who's responsible for each step:
| Phase | When | You provide | The team does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Tell us | Day 1 | A brief questionnaire - pages you need, design preferences, business details. Logo, colors, and fonts if you have them. | Maps your site structure, inventories your existing site, selects an industry-matched design direction. |
| 2. We build | Days 3–12 | Nothing. This phase runs without you. | Adapts the design to your brand, writes and lays out every page from your questionnaire, migrates your content, integrates tools, tests across devices. |
| 3. You approve | Week 2 | Your feedback, consolidated into one revision round. | Implements your changes, prepares launch, puts the finished site live at a preview address for final review. |
| 4. Switchover | Launch day | Connect your domain - most people finish in under 5 minutes. | Executes the cutover: DNS guidance, 301 redirect map goes live, old URLs route to new pages, sitemap submitted. |
| 5. We run it | Month 2+ | Update requests as your business changes. | Ships every change on the plan's SLA, monitors speed and indexing from the dashboard. |
Two structural details make this timeline honest rather than optimistic. First, the build happens in parallel - your current site keeps working the entire time, so there's no pressure-cooker cutover and no downtime window. Second, the revision process is one consolidated round, not an open-ended ping-pong. That single design decision is what separates a two-week process from a twelve-week one: agency timelines balloon precisely because review cycles multiply.
What You Provide vs. What the Team Does
Your total time investment across the whole migration is measured in hours, not weeks: roughly an hour on the questionnaire, an hour or two reviewing the build and writing consolidated feedback, and five minutes on the domain. Everything else - design, layout, launch copywriting, content migration, redirect mapping, testing, hosting setup - happens on the team's side of the table.
Worth flagging for planning purposes: at launch, the team writes your pages from the questionnaire - launch copywriting is included in the free build. After launch, the ongoing service implements, formats, and publishes the content you provide; continuous new content creation is a separate Campaign add-on. Similarly, the technical SEO foundation - redirects, meta, JSON-LD, sitemap, llms.txt - is included on every plan, while ongoing SEO campaigns are separate strategy engagements. Knowing those boundaries up front is part of why the timeline holds.
What Actually Slows a Migration Down
When a migration runs past three weeks, it's almost always one of five causes - and most are avoidable with a day of preparation:
Slow questionnaire turnaround. The clock starts when the questionnaire comes back. Owners who sit on it for two weeks have a five-week migration and a two-week build.
Scattered assets. Logo files nobody can find, photos living on an ex-employee's laptop, brand colors that exist only as "the blue on the old site." Gather logo, photos, and any brand files before day one and this cost disappears.
Feedback in fragments. Ten emails of piecemeal notes take longer to implement than one consolidated list - and each fragment risks another cycle. The one-round structure works when the round is genuinely complete.
Custom integrations. Standard marketing sites fit the standard timeline. Niche third-party integrations or database features are scoped separately with a written quote, and that scoping adds calendar time by design - quotes before work, no surprises.
Domain access mysteries. The five-minute switchover assumes you can log into your registrar. Verifying that login during week one - rather than launch day - is the cheapest insurance in the whole project. Plan-level detail matters a little here too: the free build ships in about two weeks on Growth and Premium, while Essentials builds target roughly 30 days - see the plan pages for specifics.
The Part That Takes No Time at All: The Actual Switch
The word "migration" conjures a risky cutover weekend. The reality is an anticlimax, and deliberately so. Your rebuilt site goes live at a preview address first; you click through it, confirm it's right, and only then does your domain move. DNS propagation happens in the background while your old site keeps serving traffic, and visitors simply start landing on the new site - same domain, no outage, no "under construction" page. If anything looks wrong in those first minutes, pointing the domain back at the old site is equally instant, which means the cutover carries a built-in undo button that traditional launch weekends never had. The 301 redirect map goes live at the same moment, so every old URL Google has indexed routes to its new home from minute one. What happens to rankings from there is its own topic - covered in full in what happens to your SEO when you rebuild- but the short version is: the switchover itself is the safest step of the whole process when the redirects ship with it.
After Launch: The Clock That Keeps Ticking
The 2–3 week question usually hides a second question: how long will changes take after the site is live? That's where the plan tiers actually differ. On WorkspaceCMS, every plan includes the team shipping your updates - content edits, image swaps, new blog posts from content you provide, templated pages - and the tier sets the turnaround target: 4 business days on Essentials, 2 business days on Growth's priority queue, and 12–24 hours on Premium's white-glove queue. Blockers (site down, login broken) run on faster targets still, tier by tier.
Those aren't aspirational numbers: across a recent 90-day sample, 652 update requests were completed in an average of under a day. The point of quoting that isn't bragging - it's that "how long does switching take" is really a question about the whole relationship. A three-month agency rebuild followed by two-week waits for every text change is a slower website experience, permanently, than a three-week migration into a service that ships changes in days. Measure the timeline you'll live with, not just the one on the project plan.
How Long Website Migration Takes FAQ
Will my website go down during the migration?
No. The new site is built in parallel while your current one stays live, launches at a preview address for your review, and takes over only at the domain switchover - which swaps where your domain points without any outage window. Visitors on your old site mid-switch simply get the new site on their next visit.
How much of my own time will the switch take?
A few hours total, spread over 2–3 weeks: about an hour for the questionnaire, an hour or two to review the finished build and write one consolidated round of feedback, and under five minutes to connect your domain. The design, build, writing, migration, and testing all happen on the team's side.
Why do agency rebuilds take 8–16 weeks when this takes 2–3?
Mostly process, not effort: agencies run bespoke discovery phases, multi-stakeholder review loops, and project queues shared across clients. A managed platform treats migration as a repeatable production process - industry-matched design foundations, a structured questionnaire replacing discovery, and one consolidated revision round. Hundreds of repetitions make the timeline predictable.
When does my subscription start - at signup or at launch?
The plan starts at signup, which is what funds the build phase - that's the free-build model, and it's backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee if the delivered work isn't what was promised. The honest economics of that arrangement get a full writeup in "The Free Website Build: What's the Catch?"
What should I have ready before day one to keep the timeline short?
Four things: your logo files (and any brand fonts or colors), your best photos, login access to your domain registrar, and a rough list of the pages you want. With those in hand, the questionnaire takes an hour and nothing blocks the build. Miss them and each one adds a round-trip to the schedule. If some of it doesn't exist - no professional photos, no formal brand kit - say so on day one rather than hunting for two weeks: the build proceeds with industry-appropriate imagery and a clean type-and-color system derived from your logo, which is usually an upgrade on what the old site was doing anyway.
Related Reading
- Switching from Wix: What Actually Transfers (and What Gets Rebuilt)
- Leaving Squarespace? Here's What Moves With You - and What Stays Behind
- What Happens to Your SEO When You Rebuild Your Website
Three Weeks From Now, This Could Be Done
The honest timeline for switching platforms isn't a season of your life - it's a questionnaire this week, a build you don't touch next week, and a five-minute domain change after that. Start with the free checkup on the switch page, see the finished standard at /demos, and check the flat plans at /pricing. Your old site keeps running while the new one gets built - the only thing the wait is costing you is another few weeks of the site you already want to leave.
