Website redesign cost: why the published ranges disagree by 40x, and what the number actually depends on

I read the whole first page of Google for this query in September 2026 and wrote down every number on it.

The lowest was $1,000. The highest was $200,000. That part is not surprising; every pricing page hedges. What surprised me is that two of those pages describe the same buyer, in the same words, and disagree by a factor of ten. One says a small-business redesign of ten to twenty pages runs $15,000 to $40,000. Another says a small-business redesign runs $1,500 to $10,000.

They are both right, and the reason is worth more than any of the numbers on that page.

How much does a website redesign cost?

I charge $3,900 per week. A typical redesign is three to four weeks, so $11,700 to $15,600. Design and implementation come from the same person, so there is no handoff inside that number.

Across the vendors ranking for this term the picture is roughly this: $1,000 to $10,000 buys a new template over your existing content, $10,000 to $40,000 buys a rebuild of a small or mid-size site, and anything above $40,000 is paying for an organisation as much as for a website. Of the eighteen pages I read, one publishes a price without asking for a form first. Its floor is $15,000.

Why the published ranges disagree by 40x

Because "redesign" names two different projects, and no page on that results page says which one it is quoting.

The first project is a new template over content that stays as it is. Same pages, same URLs, same copy, new design. It is real work and it is worth paying for, and it can genuinely be done in a week.

The second is a rebuild. The structure changes, the copy gets rewritten, URLs move, integrations get reconnected, and someone reads the eight-year blog archive and decides page by page what happens to it.

Both get sold as "a website redesign", and one of them is forty times more work than the other. That is why $2,000 and $60,000 sit on the same results page. Two products are sharing a name.

So the first thing to settle is which of the two you are buying.

What actually drives the number

Four things, in roughly the order they move the price.

The volume of old content matters more than the count of new pages. A thirty-page site with eight years of blog behind it is a large project even when there are only four new templates, because someone has to read that archive and decide, page by page, whether it moves, merges, or dies. A quote priced by template count is pricing the wrong variable.

The number of URLs that change comes next, and it drives the redirect work directly. Each changed address needs a redirect, and the ones that matter have to be written by hand. This is the line that most often gets a sentence in the quote and a week in the project.

Then everything bolted onto the old site over the years: analytics, tracking scripts, forms posting somewhere, a booking or commerce integration, a chat widget nobody remembers installing. None of it is visible on the page and all of it breaks in a move. In my experience this is the line most often underestimated in a quote.

Last is the approval chain. A redesign always has someone with an opinion about the old site, and each additional approver spends calendar time rather than working time. It is why the same scope takes three weeks for a founder and three months for a committee.

None of the four is about how the site looks. Visual scope is the thing buyers ask about and the thing that moves the number least.

What a website redesign costs at each tier

These are my rates and my sprint length, not a market survey. The shape is what transfers. The jump from the first row to the third is roughly four times, and it is bought almost entirely with content and URL work rather than with design.

There is no calculator on this page on purpose. A calculator that produces a number from three dropdowns is guessing at the four variables above, and the guess is always flattering.

What a website redesign costs compared to a new site

A redesign is usually more expensive than a new site of the same size, which surprises people.

On a new build you pay for what gets made. On a redesign you pay for that plus everything that already exists: the archive someone has to read through, and the integrations nobody ever wrote down. A brand new five-page site has no archive and nothing to redirect, so it can be genuinely cheap.

The exception is a small, healthy site where only the design is tired. Then the redesign is the cheaper job, because the content work is already done.

Website redesign checklist

Before you accept any quote:

• Ask which of the two projects you are buying: template over existing content, or rebuild.
• Get a redirect map as a named deliverable, reviewed before launch rather than after.
• Count the URLs that will change. If nobody has counted them, the quote is a guess.
• List every integration on the current site, including the ones nobody has looked at in two years.
• Decide who has final approval and write the name down. This is a budget line.
• Get a Search Console baseline before launch, not after.
• Ask what happens if rankings drop, and get the answer in the contract.
• Check whether the price is per project or per week, and what stops it growing.

Half of those are content decisions rather than technical ones, and they are yours whether or not anybody asks you to make them. A vendor who puts them in front of you is giving you the chance to decide. A vendor who does not is deciding for you, quietly, and usually by picking whatever is fastest.

When the cheapest quote is the right one

If your site is five pages, the URLs are not changing, the copy is already written, and search is not where your customers come from, then a redesign is design work. Buy design work. The cheapest quote you get is probably correct, and everything above is overhead you would be paying for nothing.

The reason to spend more is specific: URLs are moving, the site produces leads you cannot afford to drop during the move, or a previous redesign stalled because nobody owned the whole of it.

If that is where you are, I design and build both halves myself, at $3,900 per week.

And if URLs are moving, the part that decides whether the move keeps your rankings is written up separately in website redesign SEO.