How Many Revision Rounds Should a Website Project Include?

"Unlimited revisions" reads well in a proposal. It also means the project never really ends. Somewhere around round seven, a client is asking you to swap the hero image again, the invoice hasn't changed, and the launch date keeps sliding.

The fix isn't to get stricter with clients mid-project. It's to decide the number before the project starts, write it into the proposal, and give them a workflow that makes each round easy to use well.

Why "unlimited" backfires

Unlimited revisions removes the one thing that makes feedback useful: a deadline. Without a cap, there's no pressure to batch comments, prioritize them, or decide what's actually worth changing. Requests trickle in one at a time over weeks, and each one quietly resets the review clock.

It also changes how clients behave. When rounds are free, "let me sit with it a bit longer" costs nothing. When a round is finite, people read the whole page before they comment, because they know the next look costs them a slot.

The number that actually works: two structured rounds

For most website builds, two rounds covers it:

• Round one - structural and content feedback on the first full draft: layout, copy, missing sections, navigation.
• Round two - polish: spacing, color, copy tweaks, the smaller things round one surfaced.

A third round can exist, but as a priced decision, not a default freebie: a stakeholder who missed round one, a late rebrand, or feedback that amounts to a redesign.

Define what a "round" actually is

A round is one consolidated batch of feedback, not a trickle. Set a deadline for comments to arrive, usually five business days, bundle everything that comes in, ship one update, repeat. If a client sends three emails over two weeks before you've shipped anything back, that's still round one.

Ryan Singer's Shape Up methodology, developed at Basecamp, makes a related bet for product work: fix the time, let the scope flex. Applied to revisions, the round count and the deadline for each one stay fixed; what a client chooses to spend that round on is their call.

Put it in the proposal, not just the kickoff call

Verbal agreements get forgotten by round four. A short clause covers it:

• Number of rounds included, e.g. "two rounds of revisions"
• What counts as a round: one consolidated batch of feedback, with a submission deadline
• What happens after: additional rounds billed hourly or at a flat rate
• What doesn't count as a revision: your own bugs and errors are fixed free, always

Separating bugs from revisions matters more than it looks. A missing favicon isn't a revision request, it's your mistake to fix. Lump the two together and clients start feeling penalized for reporting real problems, which just means they stop reporting them.

A clause you can copy

Something close to this, adjusted to your own project size, covers the gap most proposals leave open:

• "This project includes two rounds of revisions. A round begins when a complete draft is delivered and ends when consolidated feedback is received and addressed."
• "Feedback for each round must be submitted within five business days of delivery; feedback submitted piecemeal over a longer period is still treated as one round."
• "Additional rounds beyond the two included are billed at [your hourly rate] per round."
• "Bugs and defects are corrected at no charge and do not count against the revision allowance."

Read it to the client on the kickoff call, not just hand it to them in a PDF. Most pushback happens when a client is surprised mid-project, not when the boundary is set up front.

Make each round easy to use well

Projects blow past their round count less often because clients are demanding and more often because the tool makes it hard to leave clear, consolidated feedback. A shared doc collects duplicate comments. Email threads lose context by reply four. Screenshots with arrows drawn in Preview get the location wrong half the time, and by the time you've figured out which page they mean, the round deadline has slipped.

A tool where clients pin comments directly on the live page keeps a round contained: every note has a location, a thread, and a status, so "did you see my email about the footer" never comes up, and you can see at a glance whether a round is actually finished or just quiet. Roundmark's free plan covers three projects with no card required, enough to run one real round through it before you decide whether it's worth paying for.