01Web Design · 8 min
The honest answer is that "website redesign" describes jobs that differ by a factor of twenty, which is why published ranges are so wide as to be useless. What follows is what actually moves the number, so you can place your own project rather than guess.
What drives the cost
Page count — less than people expect
Twenty pages does not cost four times what five pages costs. Most of the work sits in the templates; additional pages using an existing template are comparatively cheap. What is expensive is a page that needs its own layout, its own logic, or its own content strategy.
Content — usually the biggest hidden variable
Whether you supply finished copy or the project includes research, interviews, and writing is often the single largest line item. Projects stall here more than anywhere else, and a quote that assumes you will deliver final copy in week two is quietly assuming something that rarely happens.
Migration complexity
An existing site with real traffic and rankings needs URL inventory, redirect mapping, and post-launch verification. That work is invisible on the finished site and essential to it — see our website redesign checklist for what it involves. A site with no traffic to preserve does not need it, and costs less accordingly.
Integrations
A CRM, a booking system, a payment flow, a members' area, or a compliance-sensitive intake path each add real engineering. This is where a redesign stops being a redesign and becomes software.
Custom design versus a template
A template constrains the design to what the template does. That is sometimes exactly right. Custom design costs more and is worth it when the site has to do something specific — communicate expertise, handle a complex service structure, or differentiate in a crowded category.
Rough ranges
- Template refresh, content carried over: low thousands. Appropriate when the current site works structurally and looks dated.
- Custom redesign for an established business site: mid five figures upward, depending on content scope and migration complexity. This is where most professional-services and healthcare redesigns land.
- Redesign with substantial integrations or e-commerce: materially higher, because the engineering surface is larger than the design surface.
For reference, our own website projects start at $6,000 USD with fixed scope in writing. Full ranges are on our pricing page.
How to read a quote
Cheap and under-scoped look identical on a one-page proposal. The difference shows in what is named:
- Is content writing included, or assumed? The most common cause of a project running over.
- Is SEO migration named as a deliverable? If redirects and URL mapping are not mentioned, they are probably not planned.
- What happens after launch? Whether a support or verification window exists, and for how long.
- How many revision rounds? Unlimited revisions usually means the price has absorbed the risk.
- Who owns the code and the accounts? Worth settling before you sign, not after a disagreement.
- Is the scope fixed in writing? A range with no boundary is not a quote.
The question worth asking first
Before comparing prices, it is worth being specific about what the redesign is supposed to change — more qualified inquiries, a shorter sales cycle, fewer unsuitable leads. A redesign scoped against a number can be evaluated afterwards. A redesign scoped against "it looks dated" cannot, and tends to cost more than expected because nobody can say when it is finished.
If you want that framed against your current site specifically, our website redesign services page explains how we scope it.
