The short version
- Redesign quotes vary because “redesign” covers about five different jobs.
- Design is rarely the expensive part. Content migration and integration are.
- The cheapest quote usually has the most assumptions hidden in it. Ask what is excluded.
- A redesign that keeps the platform costs a fraction of a rebuild that replaces it.
Ask three agencies to quote for a redesign and the numbers will not be close. That is not because two of them are chancing it. It is because nobody agreed what “redesign” means before the quoting started.
What you are actually buying
Five components. Which ones you need is most of the answer.
Design
Applying your existing brand to a new layout, through to a full design system with every page type, component and state drawn. The gap between those is large and it is mostly a question of how many original screens someone has to produce.
Build
Turning the design into a fast, accessible site on a CMS your team can use. Invisible when done well and expensive to retrofit when not.
Content
The line most often underestimated, and the most common cause of a late project. Copywriting, photography, and the migration of what already exists. Two hundred existing pages is two hundred decisions about keep, rewrite, merge or retire.
Integration
Connecting to your CRM, accounts, stock or booking systems. On a serious project this is where the cost lives, because it is software work rather than page assembly.
Migration and redirects
The URL inventory, the redirect map, and protecting what currently ranks. Small compared with the rest, and the thing that costs most when skipped.
Ask each agency what is excluded, not what is included. Inclusions are marketing. Exclusions are where the surprises live, and the answers will tell you far more.
Rough shapes of project
Broad categories, to work out which conversation you are in. Our own starting points are on the pricing page.
- A content refresh. Same platform, same structure, rewritten copy and updated imagery on the pages that matter. The cheapest useful intervention, and often the right one.
- A redesign. Same platform and URLs, new design applied throughout, content rewritten, conversion and tracking sorted. No migration risk because nothing moves.
- A rebuild. New foundations, restructured, migrated, redirected. Everything above plus the structural work.
- A rebuild with systems behind it. The above plus real integration or bespoke functionality. At this point you are commissioning software with a website attached and it should be scoped that way.
Five things that quietly multiply the number
- The size of the existing site. Not the new one. Migration effort scales with what you already have, and a large old site is expensive to move even when the new one is small.
- Older systems. If your CRM or accounts package has no modern interface, connecting to it is bespoke work. Ask this question first, because it moves the number more than anything else.
- Who writes the content. If the answer is the agency, it belongs in the price. If it is you, be realistic about capacity.
- Accessibility done properly. Cheap when designed in, expensive bolted on. Not optional if you supply the public sector.
- Approval by committee. Every additional decision maker adds review rounds. Honest agencies price for it.
Trying to work out what your redesign should cost? Tell us the site, roughly how many pages it has, and what it needs to connect to. We will give you an honest range and the reasoning behind it before anyone talks about design.
What comes after launch
Budget for the running of it or the build money is wasted.
- Hosting. Modest, but the cheapest hosting costs you in speed, and speed costs you in rankings and conversion.
- Maintenance. Updates, backups, monitoring, security. Neglected sites do not degrade gracefully, they get compromised, and the clean-up always costs more than the maintenance would have.
- Content. What separates a site that gains search traffic from one that slowly loses it.
- Improvement. A site that never changes after launch is at its best on day one, which is the wrong way round.
Questions worth asking before you sign
- Who owns the code and the design files when this ends?
- Can we host it wherever we choose?
- What happens if we want to leave in two years, and what do we take with us?
- Can our team edit pages without calling you?
- What is your assumption about who writes the content?
- Is the redirect map included, and who signs it off?
- Is tracking and attribution set up, and is it in the price?
- What does support cost afterwards, and what does it cover?
The first three matter more than people realise. A cheap site you cannot take with you is not cheap.
Common questions
Why is a redesign so much cheaper than a rebuild?
Because the expensive parts of a rebuild are integration, migration and structure, and a redesign touches none of them. If your foundations are sound, you are paying for design and words rather than plumbing.
Should we get a fixed price?
For a defined scope, yes. For a project with real uncertainty, a fixed price on an undefined scope becomes either a padded number or a series of change requests. A short paid discovery phase is usually the cheapest risk you can buy.
Is it cheaper to keep our current platform?
Almost always, if the platform is not the problem. Changing it is expensive disruption, and we would tell you when it is not worth it.
How do we compare quotes that look wildly different?
Give every agency the same brief, then compare the exclusions rather than the inclusions. Most of the variance comes from different assumptions about content and integration, not from different margins. There is more on this in our guide to writing a website brief.
