What Does a Website Redesign Cost?

Refresh, redesign or rebuild

Content migration: the hidden cost

Design is what people budget for. Content is what blows the budget. Every page on the old site has to be either moved, rewritten, merged or deliberately dropped, and someone has to decide which. On a fifty-page site that is fifty decisions plus the work each one implies.

• Inventory: export every URL with its traffic and its purpose. Pages nobody visits are candidates to merge or drop.
• Rewrite versus move: moving text is cheap; rewriting is where hours go, and it is usually where the value is.
• Images and files: old images are often too small or badly cropped for a new layout. Budget for new photography or careful selection.
• Forms, downloads, embedded tools: each one is an integration to be rebuilt and tested.
• Who writes: if it is you, the calendar is the cost. Redesigns stall for months waiting for copy.

Ask every agency how migration is priced: per page, as a fixed lump, or left to you. A quote that says nothing about content is a quote that assumes you will do it.

Keeping SEO value during a redesign

A redesign can erase years of search visibility in a week, and the mechanism is simple: Google ranks specific URLs. Change the URL without a redirect, remove the page, or rewrite it around a different topic, and the ranking goes with it. Protecting that value is a defined piece of work and should appear in the quote.

1. Crawl the old site and record every URL, title and the queries it ranks for in Search Console.
2. Map every old URL to a new one and set permanent redirects; never let a ranking page return a 404.
3. Keep the headings and core content of ranking pages recognisable, however the design changes.
4. Launch with the sitemap, structured data and analytics in place, then watch Search Console weekly for a month.

This is the same checklist we follow inside a business website launch, and the detailed version is in our guide to launching a new site without losing rankings.

How to scope it before asking for quotes

Send the same one-page brief to every supplier and the quotes become comparable. The brief needs six things:

• Which of the three projects you believe you need, and why.
• The page inventory with a keep, rewrite, merge or drop decision per page.
• Integrations to keep: booking, CRM, newsletter, payment, forms.
• Who writes the copy and who supplies images.
• Non-negotiables: accessibility, languages, launch date, hosting.
• Ownership: you must own the domain, the code or theme, and all content at the end.

With that in hand, fixed prices are possible. Ours are on the pricing page, and if you are still unsure what to put in the brief, our requirements guide walks through it.

When not to redesign at all

We sell website projects, and a good share of the redesign enquiries we get should not become one. If the site loads quickly, ranks for your services and the problem is that visitors do not contact you, the cause is usually a specific page, an unclear offer or a broken form, and a UX audit that fixes ten things is a far cheaper purchase than a new site. If the site is fine but you are bored of it, that is a refresh, not a rebuild. And if the business itself is changing, wait until the new offer is settled; a redesign of an unsettled business is a redesign you do twice.

Buy the redesign when the platform blocks you, when the structure no longer matches what you sell, or when the site actively costs you trust. If you cannot tell which case applies, fifteen minutes on a call with the site open will usually settle it.

Frequently asked questions