A website redesign in the UK can cost anything from a few hundred pounds for a new coat of paint to tens of thousands for a large company rebuild. The range is wide because 'redesign' covers very different jobs. The first step is working out which job you actually need.
It also helps to know that the price of a redesign is rarely about the visual design alone. Most of the cost sits in content, structure and the careful work of moving an existing site without breaking what already works.
This guide explains the types of redesign, what each typically costs, what pushes the price up, and how to make sure a new site does not undo the Google visibility the old one had built up.
Refresh, rebuild or replatform: which do you need?
- Refresh: same site, same platform, updated look. New colours, fonts, photos, a tidier homepage. Useful when the structure works but the site looks dated.
- Rebuild: new design and new structure, often new copy, usually on the same kind of platform. The most common small business redesign.
- Replatform: moving from one system to another, for example from Wix to a custom site, or from an old WordPress install to something faster. Involves moving content and redirecting old addresses.
- Rebrand-led redesign: the business itself has a new name, logo or positioning, and the website follows. Usually the most work, because every page changes.
Website redesign costs by type and size
Freelancers tend to sit at the lower end of each range and agencies at the upper end. Pay-monthly providers often treat a redesign as a new build, with a setup fee and a monthly fee rather than a large upfront price.
| Type of redesign | Small business site (5–10 pages) | Larger site (20–100 pages) |
|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh | £500–£2,000 | £2,000–£8,000 |
| Full rebuild, same platform | £1,500–£6,000 | £6,000–£25,000 |
| Replatform with content migration | £2,000–£8,000 | £10,000–£40,000+ |
| E-commerce redesign | £3,000–£12,000 | £15,000–£60,000+ |
What drives the cost of a redesign
- Number of pages, and how many of them need genuinely new content rather than a copy-and-paste.
- Copywriting. Rewriting a site properly often costs as much as the design, and it is usually where the biggest improvement comes from.
- Features: booking, payments, customer logins, integrations with other software.
- Moving data: products, blog posts, customer records, reviews.
- Redirects and SEO protection: mapping every old address to its new one.
- Photography. New photos of your real work, premises or team make more difference to a redesign than almost anything else visual.
- How many people need to approve it. A sole trader signs off in a day; a board can take a month.
Do not lose your Google rankings in a redesign
The most expensive redesign mistake is not in the quote. It is launching a new site that quietly drops out of Google because the old page addresses disappeared. If your old site had a page at /boiler-repairs that ranked well and the new one moves it to /services/heating, Google needs to be told, with a permanent (301) redirect from the old address to the new one.
Ask any designer quoting for a redesign how they handle this. A good answer includes a list of every existing URL, a redirect plan, keeping or improving the page titles and content that ranked, resubmitting the sitemap in Google Search Console, and checking for errors in the weeks after launch.
Also check your Google Business Profile after launch. If its website link pointed to a page that no longer exists, update it, and make sure the business name, address and phone number on the new site match the profile exactly.
Is a redesign worth it?
A redesign is worth it when the current site is costing you work. Signs of that include:
- It is hard to use on a phone, or slow to load on mobile data.
- It does not clearly say what you do and where, in the first screen.
- You get visits but very few calls or enquiries.
- You cannot update it without paying someone or wrestling with it.
- It shows a security warning, or runs on software no longer supported.
- It no longer reflects the business: old services, old prices, old photos.
How to brief a redesign so the quote is accurate
The more of this you can hand over, the less guesswork is priced into the quote. Designers add contingency for unknowns, so a clear brief often brings the price down as well as improving the result.
- A list of current pages, marked keep, merge, rewrite or delete.
- The pages that bring in the most visitors and enquiries, from Search Console or your analytics.
- What is not working now: the complaints you hear from customers and staff about the site.
- Services you have added or dropped since the current site was built.
- Features you now need, such as booking, deposits or area pages.
- Who owns the domain and hosting, and your logins for both.
- Two or three sites you like, and why.
Redesign or start again?
Sometimes a redesign costs nearly as much as a new site, especially when the old one is on an outdated platform, has content nobody wants to keep, or is locked into a provider's system. In that case, treat it as a new build with a careful migration: keep the domain, keep the useful content, redirect the old addresses, and start the design from scratch.
If your current site is on a builder such as Wix or Squarespace, the design generally cannot be moved to another host, so a move away is always a rebuild. The text and images can come with you; the layout cannot.
How we approach redesigns
Most of our projects are redesigns of sites that stopped pulling their weight. We design from scratch, rewrite the copy, map every old URL to its new home and handle the redirects, so the move does not cost you rankings. A redesign is priced like any other build: £299 setup and £99 a month on Monthly, or £1,795 and £49 a month if you would rather own the build outright, with hosting and ongoing changes included.