A major website project is one of the most significant investments a company can make. The stakes are high, the timelines are long, and the pressures are real. Yet time and again, companies fall into the same traps — mistakes that are entirely avoidable with the right approach. Here are the three biggest culprits.
1. Skimping on the Discovery Phase
Of all the phases in a website project, discovery is arguably the most important — and the most underestimated. It's tempting to rush through it and get straight to the exciting stuff: the design concepts, the build, the launch. But without a thorough discovery phase, you're essentially building in the dark.
Discovery is where you do the foundational work of understanding your audience — not just who they are on paper, but what they actually need from your website. That means getting out and talking to them. Running interviews. Conducting surveys. Digging into analytics to understand how people are currently navigating your site and where they're dropping off.
The hard truth is this: if you don't truly understand your audience, and you haven't heard directly from them what they want and need from a website, what exactly are you building? A site that looks great in a boardroom presentation but frustrates the very people it's meant to serve.
A robust discovery phase sets the entire project up for success. It informs the sitemap, the user journeys, the content strategy, and the design direction. Cut corners here, and you'll feel it at every stage that follows.
2. Leaving Content Until Last
If there's one mistake that derails more website projects than any other, it's treating content as an afterthought. It's an incredibly common pattern: the design gets signed off, the build is underway, and somewhere in a planning document, there's a line that says "content — TBC."
The assumption is that the website itself is the hard part, and the content will simply slot in at the end. It won't. It never does.
What actually happens is that as the launch date looms, the pressure to populate the site becomes enormous. Content gets rushed. Pages get cobbled together. And more often than not, companies end up simply copying and pasting copy from their old website — the very website they were trying to move away from — into their shiny new one. All that investment in design and development, undermined by the same tired messaging.
Good content takes time. It needs to be researched, written, reviewed, and refined. It needs to be developed in parallel with the design and build, not bolted on at the end. In fact, the best website projects treat content as the starting point, letting it shape the design rather than the other way around. Words first, then visuals — not the reverse.
If your project plan doesn't have content milestones running throughout the entire timeline, that's your first red flag.
3. Not Allowing Enough Time and Resource for Testing
Testing tends to be the phase that gets squeezed. By the time a project reaches this stage, the timeline has often slipped, the budget is under pressure, and there's a collective eagerness to just get the thing launched. Testing gets condensed, or worse, delegated entirely to the agency with the assumption that they'll handle it.
Here's the problem with that: agencies test for technical functionality. They're checking that things work. But they're not your customers, your stakeholders, or your staff. They don't interact with your website the way your actual audiences do.
The more eyes you get on a website before launch, the more issues you'll uncover — and that's always a good thing. Real users will navigate in unexpected ways, click on things you didn't anticipate, and hit friction points that no developer would ever notice because they know the site too well.
The solution is to open testing up as widely as possible. Bring in representatives from each of your key audience groups. Ask them to complete real tasks on the site without coaching them. Watch where they get confused, where they hesitate, and what they can't find. The insights you gather will be invaluable.
Build testing time properly into your project plan — not a week, not a long weekend, but a genuine phase with room to gather feedback, make fixes, and test again. It's the last line of defence between your company and a painful post-launch period of firefighting.
The Common Thread
What connects all three of these mistakes? They're all the result of prioritising speed over substance — of treating the visible, exciting parts of a project as the important ones, and cutting corners on the less glamorous work that actually determines success.
A great website isn't just well-designed or well-built. It's well-researched, well-written, and well-tested. Get those foundations right, and everything else becomes a lot easier.