How much does a website redesign cost?

If you are building a first site, with nothing to replace, start with what affects the cost of a website instead. This guide covers only what changes when a site already exists.

Say you run a physiotherapy clinic with three locations. The site has about forty pages and an online booking tool. You ask two providers for a redesign quote.

Quote one gives the existing pages a new look on the same platform. Addresses stay the same, the booking tool stays, the text stays except for a few edited pages.

Quote two moves the site to a different platform, regroups the forty pages into a new menu, rewrites the service pages, replaces the booking tool and changes most addresses.

Both are redesigns, both can be fair, and they are different projects. The second one includes work the first never mentions: a page-by-page inventory, rewriting, data transfer, a map of old to new addresses, redirects and checks that they work. Until you know which of these a quote includes, the totals tell you very little.

How much changes. The ladder below runs from least to most work, and our guide to the signs your website needs a redesign explains how to tell which rung you actually need.

Moving down a rung usually raises the cost, and it raises the risk to your search traffic too. That is a reason to ask early whether a smaller rung would meet your goal. A studio that only ever proposes the bottom row of the table may not be listening to you, and one that only proposes the top row may not be either.

Before anyone decides what to keep, someone has to list it. The Nielsen Norman Group defines a content inventory as "a list of every piece of digital content you currently have," and a content audit as the step that "examines, assesses, and evaluates the quality of the content listed in the inventory." In a redesign, those two steps help the team "determine what content to carry over and what to leave behind." The larger and older the site, the longer this takes, and the more forgotten pages, PDFs and campaign pages turn up. If you can hand over a clean list of pages and which of them matter, that work shrinks.

Every existing page needs a decision: keep as it is, edit, merge with another, or retire. Content that survives the audit still has to be moved into the new design, and often reformatted. Content that does not survive has to be replaced. Rewriting a page is far more work than moving one, so the proportion of old content you keep is a real cost lever.

Anything stored in the old system has to reach the new one: products, customers, order history, forms, blog posts, user logins. Shopify's own migration guide describes five ways to move content, from the least to the most technically complex: copying by hand, a CSV file, a migration app, a Shopify Partner, or a custom solution built on the API. It also notes that the order of an import matters, with products first, then customers, then historical orders. A store with a few dozen products can move by file. A store with thousands of variants, order history and customer accounts needs more care, and that care is priced into the quote. The cost here depends on volume and on how cleanly the old system lets the data out.

Every address that changes needs a destination. Google's guidance for a site move with URL changes is to build a list of old addresses, map each to its new one, set up permanent redirects on the server, update internal links, test the redirects, and monitor afterwards. It also advises making sure the server can cope, because Google will temporarily crawl the new site more heavily than usual during a move. This is invisible in a design preview and real in the hours. When we run a redesign, every page gets a decision and every moved address gets a redirect record, so someone can see later why each one went where it did. For how that works, see our guide to redesigning without losing search traffic.

A fair comparison needs a baseline. Search Console's performance data reaches back up to 16 months, and it needs to be exported before the old site goes away. After launch, someone has to check it again, page by page, and compare against the same period last year. A quote that stops on launch day may leave you without this check.

Some choices reduce the work, and they are worth discussing with any provider:

Keep the addresses that work. If a page's address does not need to change, it does not need a redirect or a check. Changing an address because the new one looks tidier adds cost and risk for little return.

Keep content that performs. An audit usually turns up pages that already do their job, and moving those costs less than rewriting them.

Do part of the inventory yourself. A spreadsheet of pages, with a note on which ones bring enquiries, saves discovery time.

Have words and photos ready. A project can stall waiting for content.

Stage the work. Rebuild the section that is failing first, and leave the rest for later.

Use a builder if it is enough. If a few simple pages meet your needs and you will edit them yourself, a website builder may be the right choice. If that is true for you, we will say so.

Some things raise the cost, and they are better known early:

Scope that changes mid-project. Our practice is to agree the scope in writing before any work starts. Two rounds of design changes are included before the build, and any further round is agreed with you, in writing, before the work starts. That keeps both sides honest about what a change costs.

Unclear ownership. If nobody knows who holds the domain, hosting or analytics account, finding out takes time.

Undocumented integrations. A booking tool or stock system nobody remembers setting up is a risk to price in.

Many people deciding. More reviewers means more rounds.

A lower quote that leaves out these four is cheaper to write and more expensive to live with:

The page inventory and URL map, when addresses change.

A test of the old addresses on the live site, after launch.

Tracking checks, so a counting problem does not look like a traffic problem.

Phone, accessibility and speed testing. We design and check against WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility and Google's Core Web Vitals targets.

Also keep ownership in writing: at handover the client owns the finished site, its content and its code.

Lay each quote in one grid. The six rows that apply to any website are in our guide to what affects the cost of a website. Add these redesign rows:

It gives no price ranges. A number with no scope behind it would only mislead, and any figure here would have to come from a source we could check. It cannot tell you whether a particular quote is good value, because that depends on what the site is worth to your business. And it cannot promise that spending more protects your search traffic: no one can honestly guarantee that, and we do not. A careful process removes the avoidable causes of loss.

If you want to know which of your current pages are worth carrying over, our guide to the website content audit covers it. If you are not yet sure what the new site must do, read planning a website redesign first, because the plan sets the scope and the scope sets the cost. If search traffic is your main worry, the migration steps are in redesigning without losing search traffic.

Our redesign service covers every rung. Your quote is tailored to your site and your scope, and you can start small. Tell us about your project, and we reply with next steps. No cost, no obligation. Discuss your project If a website builder is enough for you, we will say so.

Nielsen Norman Group, a usability researcher, "Content Inventory and Auditing 101" (2020): https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-audits/

Shopify Help Center, "Migrating to Shopify": https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/migrating-to-shopify

Google Search Central, "Site moves with URL changes": https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes

Google Search Central, "Debugging drops in Google Search traffic" (Search Console date range of 16 months): https://developers.google.com/search/docs/monitor-debug/debugging-search-traffic-drops