Redesign quotes for apparently identical briefs routinely vary by a factor of ten. That is not because some agencies are dishonest — it is because “redesign” describes anything from swapping a theme to rebuilding the information architecture, and most quotes do not make clear which they are pricing.
Here are the ranges we work in, what actually drives the number, and the two line items that get cut first and cost the most to skip.
The ranges
| Scope | Range | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Theme refresh | $2,500–$6,000 | New theme, existing structure, content poured over |
| Standard redesign | $5,500–$15,000 | Custom design, 4–7 templates, preservation work, redirect map |
| Full rebuild | $15,000–$28,000 | New architecture, content modelling, 8+ templates, phased launch |
| Multi-location / complex | $28,000+ | Location tiers, bilingual structures, ecommerce, or enterprise platforms |
These are our numbers, published because pricing opacity is the most common complaint we hear from people who have shopped this out. Your market will vary — agency rates in Los Angeles and New York run materially above these, and mid-size markets run below.
What actually drives the number
Template count, not page count
This is the variable most quotes get wrong. A site with two hundred pages built from six templates is cheaper to design and build than a site with forty pages needing fifteen distinct layouts.
The expensive work is designing each template and specifying its states — default, hover, focus, error, empty, overflow. Once a template exists, additional pages using it are a content task.
So the first scoping question is how many genuinely distinct page types you need, not how many URLs. A quote priced by page count is frequently mispriced in both directions.
Whether content is modelled or poured
A site where editable content is structured as discrete fields costs more to build and dramatically less to live with. A site where content is one rich-text blob or a page-builder canvas costs less upfront and produces a permanent dependency — every new service page becomes a bespoke build or a support ticket.
If you plan to add pages over the next three years, pay for the content model. If the site is genuinely static, do not.
Whether preservation is included
More on this below, but it is the line item that most explains why one quote is cheaper than another. A quote that omits the preservation audit and redirect map looks better and transfers a substantial risk to you.
Platform
Rebuilding on an existing platform you already know costs less than migrating. Migration adds URL mapping complexity, content export and import, and a class of technical problems that only appear at launch. Enterprise platforms with faceted catalogues — common in industrial and distribution businesses — sit at the top of any range because crawl trap remediation on those systems is genuinely involved.
The two things that get cut first
When timelines tighten or budgets get squeezed, two items disappear from scope. They are the two most expensive things to skip.
1. The preservation audit
Before designing anything, somebody has to establish what the current site actually earns: every URL with meaningful impressions or clicks, every page holding external links, current conversion paths, and the traffic distribution across templates.
That produces the protected list — pages that may be redesigned but not deleted.
Why it matters: almost every redesign audit we run surfaces at least one page nobody on the current team knew was earning. A location page built by a previous agency years ago, still ranking, absent from everybody’s mental model of the site. A blog post from four years back quietly generating a third of the enquiries. Those are exactly the pages that get cut for not fitting a new layout.
It costs a few days. Skipping it is how businesses lose their own traffic.
2. The redirect map
Every old URL mapped one-to-one to its closest new equivalent, with a deliberate recorded decision for each page being removed. Single-hop redirects, verified in staging before launch.
The specific failure mode is redirecting everything to the homepage as a catch-all. Google treats that as a soft 404 and effectively discards it, so the equity you were trying to preserve evaporates. A redirect target must be a genuinely equivalent page.
Two days of mapping against months of recovery is the clearest cost-benefit calculation in the project.
Why “traffic held but enquiries dropped” happens
This is common enough to be worth its own section, because it is rarely diagnosed correctly.
Conversion paths get reorganised for visual cleanliness. The specific culprits recur:
- The phone number moves out of the header onto a contact page
- The form moves below the fold, or onto its own page
- Proof and testimonials relocate somewhere nobody visits
- Calls to action get restyled quieter and consequently less noticed
Each change is individually defensible on design grounds and collectively costs a meaningful share of enquiries. Because traffic is unaffected, it gets attributed to the market.
Set conversion tracking before the redesign, so a baseline exists. Without it the comparison is guesswork, and the fix rarely requires reverting the visual work — it requires restoring the specific elements that were carrying conversions.
Timeline, and what actually delays projects
Eight to sixteen weeks for a typical service business site:
- Preservation audit: ~1 week
- Structure and design: 3–5 weeks
- Build: 4–8 weeks depending on template count
- Launch and monitoring: 1 week plus a month of watching
What extends projects past that is almost never design or development. It is waiting on content that only the client can provide, and unresolved internal disagreement about structure.
That second one is exactly why the page inventory comes first. It forces those arguments into week one, where they cost days, rather than into week ten, where they cost a redesign.
Recovering from a redesign that already went wrong
If this has already happened to you, it is usually recoverable, and more mechanically than people expect — the loss is structural rather than a quality judgment.
We reconstruct the pre-redesign URL inventory from Search Console history, archive crawls and backlink data, identify which URLs held rankings or links, and build the one-to-one redirects that should have existed. Where content was deleted rather than moved, we restore it into the current design.
Two things degrade with time, which argues for acting quickly. External links pointing at deleted URLs eventually get removed by the referring sites, at which point the equity is genuinely gone rather than merely disconnected. And long-404ing URLs receive progressively less crawl attention, so restoration takes longer to register.
Recovery at three months is routine. At eighteen months it is partial.
Should you phase it or relaunch at once?
It depends which risk you would rather carry.
Relaunch at once if the current site earns little. It is faster, cheaper and produces a more coherent result.
Phase it if the site is a meaningful revenue channel. Template by template isolates risk and lets you verify each change against real data — and it matters more in competitive markets where recovery is slow. In Tampa, where every page ranking for competitive terms runs five to eight thousand words, rebuilding a lost position takes months rather than weeks.
What is never acceptable is a single relaunch without a verified redirect map, which combines both risk profiles.
Questions to ask any redesign quote
- How many distinct templates are you building?
- Is a preservation audit included, and what does it produce?
- Is the redirect map a named deliverable, verified before launch?
- Will our team be able to add a new service page without a developer?
- Who owns the domain, code and hosting account at the end?
- What is the performance budget, and how is it enforced during the build?
The answers to one, two and three explain most of the variance between quotes. The answer to five is where businesses get trapped — a site built on an agency’s proprietary platform means leaving costs you the entire investment.
Our website redesign service starts with the preservation audit, and we will send you the protected URL list whether or not you redesign with us. Whatever you do, do not start without that document.