How much does a website redesign cost?

What does a redesign cost by what you're rebuilding into?

The starting point depends on what the old site becomes. These are the figures I quote from, before the audit turns them into a real number for your site.

What does the $250 audit do?

It decides whether you need a redesign at all. The audit measures the site as it is: performance on throttled mobile, accessibility, the state of the theme and plugins, an inventory of content and every URL that gets traffic, and what the site is wired to. It ends in one of three recommendations: fix it in place, fix part of it and plan the rest, or rebuild.

Failing Core Web Vitals, plugin pile-ups and page-builder bloat are usually fixable in place, and when a fix gets you where you need to be, that is what I recommend. The fee is credited against the rebuild if that is the answer, so the audit costs nothing extra when it leads to one and saves the whole project when it does not.

What moves the number?

Five things, and the platform is not one of them.

How many distinct templates the site needs. Twelve pages on three templates is a small build. Twelve pages that each look different is twelve templates, and that is the number that scales the design and build weeks.

Whether the design already exists. A brand system with type, colour and components decided saves the architecture week. A dated site with no system behind it means the system gets designed, which is the difference between the first row of the table and the second.

How much content migrates, and how clean it is. Two hundred blog posts in a well-structured CMS move in a day. Two hundred posts assembled from page-builder shortcodes with inline styling have to be mapped, cleaned and re-laid-out, and that is measured in days per hundred.

What has to integrate. A contact form is included. A CRM, a booking system, a product feed or a gated portal is each an integration with credentials, failure handling and testing behind it.

How many URLs the old site has. Every one that ranks or is linked to needs a destination. The last rebuild I shipped needed 49 redirect rules for a site of about thirty-five routes, because old URLs outnumber new pages once duplicates, legacy aliases and retired sections are counted.

Why does a redesign cost more than a new site of the same size?

Because the history is the asset, and protecting it is work a new site never has to do. A redesign inherits rankings, inbound links, analytics history and content that took years to accumulate. The rebuild price carries the three things that keep them: content migrated rather than retyped, a one-to-one redirect map live from the first request, and performance measured before and after so the improvement is documented rather than claimed.

The receipts from that last rebuild show what the extra money buys. Total blocking time on throttled mobile went from over a second to a tenth of one, the Lighthouse SEO score from 61 to 100, and the old URLs kept resolving on launch day. Retiring a page without losing its search value is the discipline behind the redirect map; a quote that is silent on redirects is not the full price.

When does fixing the site beat redesigning it?

When the platform is sound and the problems are specific. A slow WordPress site on a maintained theme usually needs a performance pass, not a rebuild. A site whose content is good and whose design is merely dated can often be re-skinned template by template. A plugin pile-up is an afternoon of removal and testing.

A fix stops being the answer when the theme has been abandoned by its vendor, when the page builder cannot clear Core Web Vitals even after the pass, when the content is trapped in shortcodes, or when the platform cannot integrate with the systems the business now runs on. That last one is the usual reason sites leave hosted builders; WordPress versus Squarespace for a business site walks through where that line sits.

What should a redesign quote include?

Read every quote for these lines. Any that are missing are either assumed to be your problem or will arrive later as a change order.

• Content and media migrated, with the count of pages and posts named.
• A one-to-one redirect map for every old URL, verified before launch.
• Performance targets in writing: Core Web Vitals on throttled mobile, not a desktop screenshot.
• Accessibility to WCAG AA, checked rather than asserted.
• Analytics and Search Console continuity, so the history is not reset on launch day.
• Training and documentation, so your team runs the content without a developer.
• A warranty period, and what maintenance looks like after it.
• Ownership: hosting, domain and code in your name.

Questions