Website Projects: 5 Pitfalls That Slow Them Down (and How to Keep Them Moving)
From the Journal – Posted 21.07.2026
A web design project requires cross-department collaboration and co-ordination to achieve one goal; a new website. But even projects that have been meticulously planned and organised can have their challenges.
Since we’re now nearly 14 years young, we’ve seen where web design projects go right, and where they can go very wrong.
In this article, we’ll cover the 5 most common pitfalls in website design and development projects, and explain how you can mitigate their impact on budget and timeline with project management best practices. Learn why the work behind your website design brief sets you up for success, what 'scope creep' is and how to stop it, and why content production needs to begin now, not later.
5 reasons web design projects get stuck
The web design brief didn’t go far enough
The brief is where it begins, but at the same time, can be where the project ends too. Writing a detailed website brief takes time and effort. There may be plenty of excitement about agency pitches, but you shouldn’t be reaching out to a single one until you and your team have done the work. While the final document is a key step to moving to the next stage, it’s actually the work that goes into creating it which is the important bit.
Why? It gives everyone on the team the chance to collaborate, share all of the objectives and requirements from their departments for the project. Website projects stay on track when one project lead makes the decisions on behalf of the team (more on that later), so the brief is the opportunity to fully scope out all requirements with stakeholders; from technical specifications to design and content.
Need help getting yours started? Learn how to write a web design brief — there's even a free template to download.
Website Design Brief Template (Free Download)
Download our free template, and learn how to write a website design project brief.
The toughest bit of the brief is review the requirements in consideration of available budget, as the likelihood is that the budget set out for the project doesn’t cover everything on the wishlist. And when briefs don’t balance their deliverables with the available budget, the project is set up to fall short.
How to keep it moving…
… as a project lead, squaring up the objectives to meet the budget will save you many headaches later down the line. Structured communications about which features will be developed for the initial launch, and which ones will come later, will offer clarity and save disagreements and hold ups once the project has begun. It also ensures all the budget gets funnelled towards the ‘must-have’ list, rather than being spread too thin, only to cut certain features which have chewed up some of it later.
Scope creep — the silent project killer
‘Scope creep’ is an industry term used to describe the slow trickle of client requests that weren’t included in the original scope of work for a project. While small additions and improvements may seem of no consequence, scope creep can undermine workflow efficiencies and cause unnecessary delays and accrue costs. Add a component here, add this webpage here, and at the end, no one can quite put their finger on where the timeline disappeared too, and why the project budget has been spent with weeks left to go.
Plus, it’s often these additions which end up causing issues at design or development stage, setting the project back.
How to keep it moving…
…every additional request that is outside the original scope needs to be reviewed by the project lead. A great agency with experienced web design project managers (hello!) will always work with you to incorporate as much as possible and be upfront about what elements realistically will need additional budget or time. Should the budget be significantly short, we’ll work out the MVP to begin working on a Phase 2 scope, to provide clarity on how the project can meet the original objectives over time with more investment.
Design by committee
A new website is something that absolutely everyone will want to have a say on. But your project timeline won’t ever reconcile with this approach, so I urge you; nominate one person who collects feedback, and makes a decision on behalf of the team. While it may seem diplomatic to put decisions down to a vote, inevitably, the design intent gets lost along the way. The concept, or functionality ends up watered down to satisfy a range of compromising opinions, who often don’t have the full picture.
This approach also takes time. By the time you’ve got key decision makers in the room, collected their feedback and communicated to the developers or designers, it’s a week and half later and the timeline has to be reset.
How to keep things moving…
The most successful projects we’ve worked on have one decision maker, who reviews and rationalises feedback from the team against the project objectives to make an informed decision. This way, the considered conceptual design response for the brand identity work from the agency remains intact, and crucially, the project stays on track.
The content isn’t ready (again)
This is the one. The one most likely to push back the launch date you’ve had the rest of the team working towards. Content is at worst, an afterthought, or at best listed as a ‘content production’ or ‘content migration’ task near the bottom of the project timeline.
Our advice from agency practice is that content production can not start soon enough. Whether it’s an internal team member or you’re briefing a content writer, start the process as soon as you start the project so the production happens in tandem. Trying to shoehorn too much content onto pages with way less space often means going back to make design updates. Design changes, at that stage in the game not means big delays but also a disjointed UI.
Designers benefit from having clarity on how you want to communicate on landing pages; it allows them to create concepts and interfaces with a clear understanding of the fields required to effectively communicate your products, story or services.
How to keep things moving…
Don’t wait until you’ve got the staging site before you start briefing the content tasks. Review your content when you write the website brief, determine if any verbal identity work needs to evolve as part of the brand identity, and map out content requirements.
Can AI-assisted content generation speed us the process? If you're questioning whether to use generative AI tools to write your website content, there's a sound argument for producing first-drafts to get the ball rolling. But the bottomline line is, if you want your content to perform, don't skip rounds of expert reviews and edits.
By establishing what you need to communicate, and creating a narrative which determines how you're going to communicate it — you’ll end up with a better result. And your project timeline won’t take the hit.
No post-launch plan
We see this project particularly where a fresh brand identity concept has been the main focus, and the website is the culmination and final deliverable of the rebrand. It may look and feel like a game-changing brand asset now, but if there’s no post launch plan for maintenance, no content plan to keep the new site fresh, then the new website you’ve invested all your budget on starts looking neglected very quickly.
How to keep things moving…
In a similar vein to many of these points I’ve made, don’t leave this task until later. Work on the post launch plan early in the project (yes, as early as your initial brief work) to cover things like content strategy, regular reviews of code, and clear set of requirements to set up an ongoing support arrangement with your development agency to maintain this. This way, there’s already a plan in place that can be set in motion post launch. It might even include planning for a phase 2 launch. It’s no bad thing to leave out chunky pieces of development work from the first iteration — constantly evolving the website keeps it fresh, and allows iterations to improve it over time.
Why do web design projects need project management?
Managing a project in a systematic and structured framework that takes timelines, budgets and resources into account supports collaboration, communication and timely delivery. And, importantly, helps you prepare and avoid the project pitfalls that kick the launch date down the road.
What does effective project management do? Here’s a 5-point summary and explainer why it sets your redesign project up for success:
Sets and defines goals.
Objectives that have been discussed and clearly-defined set your project up for success. They focus the whole project, and define what success for the project looks like from the outset. Skilled project managers work back from goals to break down large projects into project stages, deliverables, and tasks to establish project requirements, resources and timelines. So, it really does all start with goal-setting.
Encourages collaboration.
Project management dissects the goals into timeline specific objectives and tasks, offering team members the time and clarity they need to contribute openly. It encourages team members to step out of organisational silos, identify common ground and promote clear channels of communication. Cue my next point…
Improves communication.
Communication and collaboration go hand in hand, but there is a specific reason effective project management improves communication. And that is, in addition to promoting collaboration among the team, it defines how the team communicates (dedicated Slack channels is our preferred means) and shares information. By keeping communication structured, not only does the collaborative effort result in better outcomes, but it keeps the project on track, reducing the risk of being derailed by undocumented scope creep and design by committee decisions being made.
Defines roles.
Proactive project management always assigns roles, so everyone is clear what they are responsible for from the top. It’s not a matter of listing job titles, it’s about defining the role they’ll fulfil for the project specifically; who is the project lead, the point of contact, the decision maker, the risk manager? Because a new website usually runs alongside business-as-usual, and cross-functional teams can overlap, a small, dedicated project team promotes decision-making, delegation and responsibility — nipping the ‘too many cooks’ problem in the bud.
Manages resources.
Effective project management helps manage resources by making it clear who's needed, when, and for how long, across the whole lifecycle of a website project. By mapping human, financial, and technical resources against key milestones — the brief, design sign-off, build, testing, launch — a project manager can spot clashes and gaps early, allocate the right skills to the right tasks, and flex capacity up during demanding phases, such as adding extra developers or QA testers. This prevents overloading teams who are already at capacity, and supports cost efficiencies.
Do you need a project manager?
Yes, you do! Work with an external project manager at a reliable web design and development agency and your website has the best chance possible of being launched on time, and on budget. They can’t promise you might avoid all the potential challenges; but they can offer clear leadership to sidestep the internal politics that come from unclear ownership. Vague briefs, scope creep, design by committee, late content, no post-launch plan — all the reasons web projects get stuck have the same root cause: nobody was clearly accountable for the decisions and challenges a project inevitably throws up.
An experienced project manager does more than simply track a timeline; they protect it. By making sure the right people are pulled in at the right moment, the budget is spent on what matters most, and every 'quick addition' gets weighed against what it'll actually cost you in time and money.
If that sounds like exactly the support your team could use for your next website project, get in touch — we'd love to talk you through how we keep things moving, from brief to launch and beyond.