The short answer
No — but you should have at least a rough brand direction before the build starts, or you risk paying to rebuild the site once the logo arrives. A logo can be designed alongside the site; a completely undefined brand cannot.
What you actually need before day one
- A name and tagline — even a working version — so headings and titles aren't placeholders
- A rough colour direction — two or three colours you're drawn to, even without exact hex codes
- A sense of tone — formal or casual, playful or serious — since this shapes both design and copy
Everything else — the final logo file, an exact type system, a full brand guide — can be built in parallel with the site, or refined afterward.
Why building both together often works better
A logo designed in isolation, without seeing it on a real page, sometimes doesn't hold up once it's next to real headlines and buttons. Designing the logo and the site together — or at least close together — means the two are tested against each other from the start, instead of one being retrofitted to the other.
If you already have a logo
Even better — it becomes the anchor for the whole visual system: colours, fonts, and spacing are pulled from it rather than invented separately. This is usually the fastest path from brief to a site that feels like one coherent brand rather than a template with a logo dropped in.
If you have nothing yet
That's fine too. A first site can launch with a clean wordmark — your business name, set in a considered typeface — and a proper logo can follow later without holding up the launch.
Starting from scratch, logo included? Get in touch — brand systems and web build are handled as one connected project, not two separate hand-offs.