How much should a website redesign cost?

Is it a redesign, or a rescue?

People say 'redesign' when they mean very different things. Sometimes the site looks dated but works fine, and a visual refresh is all it needs. Sometimes it looks fine but brings in no enquiries, which is not a design problem at all. And sometimes it is slow, broken on phones and impossible to update, which is a rebuild.

Working out which of those you have is most of the job, because they cost wildly different amounts and only one of them involves starting again.

The three honest versions

• A refresh: the same site underneath, with a new look, better words and photos, and a tidied layout. The cheapest option, and often all a decent site needs. Roughly a few hundred to a couple of thousand pounds.
• A rework: keep what works, fix what does not, sharpen the pages meant to bring in enquiries, and sort out speed and mobile. The middle ground, usually £1,500 to £5,000.
• A rebuild: the site is genuinely past saving and you start again properly. Priced like a new website, because that is what it is.

A lot of people are sold a rebuild when a rework would have done, because starting from scratch is easier to quote and more profitable to sell. It is worth pushing back on that.

What actually makes a redesign worth it

A new look on its own rarely pays for itself. A redesign earns its cost when it fixes something that is losing you work: a site so slow that people leave before it loads, one that is unreadable on a phone where most of your visitors already are, or one that looks untrustworthy enough that people bounce straight off it.

If your current site brings in enquiries and simply feels old to you, be honest about whether that is a business problem or a personal one. Sometimes the money is better spent elsewhere, and I will tell you if I think it is.

Do not throw away what already works

If your site is found on Google for anything useful, a careless redesign can quietly wreck that overnight, and it is slow and painful to win back. A good redesign protects what already works, your search presence, your strongest pages, the addresses people have bookmarked, while fixing what does not. If whoever quotes you never mentions this, treat it as a warning sign.

So what should it cost?

It depends entirely on which of the three you actually need, and the cheapest one that solves your real problem is the right one: a refresh for a few hundred, a rework in the low thousands, or a full rebuild priced like a new site. The way to find out which you need is to look at what the site is failing to do, not just how it looks.