Almost everyone arriving at this page wants one number first, so here it is before anything else. A website redesign runs from a few hundred dollars to six figures, and the four tiers below explain which one you are actually in. The spread is not vagueness. It is four genuinely different products sold under one phrase.
A Squarespace, Wix or WordPress theme and your own time.
Someone else installs and customises a theme and migrates your content.
Original design, with structure decided from your actual users rather than a template.
Multiple integrations and a CMS your team can genuinely run.
What a website redesign costs
| What you are buying | Typical range | What you get, and what you do not |
|---|---|---|
| Template, done yourself | $0 to $500 | A Squarespace, Wix or WordPress theme and your own time. Genuinely fine for a brochure site. You are the designer, the copywriter and the person who fixes it at 11pm. |
| Template, done for you | $500 to $5,000 | Someone else installs and customises a theme, migrates your text and launches it. This is the tier behind most of the very low fixed-price offers you will see advertised. It is a real service and often a sensible buy, as long as you know you are getting a configured template rather than a design made for your business. |
| Custom redesign | $5,000 to $30,000 | Original design, structure decided from your actual users and goals, content restructured rather than poured across, proper redirect mapping, analytics and accessibility. This is where most business redesigns belong. |
| Complex or regulated | $30,000 to $100,000+ | Multiple integrations, a CMS your team can genuinely run, ecommerce or portal functionality, accessibility conformance you can evidence, or a migration off something fragile. |
Most quotes land far apart because vendors are answering different questions. Ask any of them which tier they are quoting before comparing two numbers.
What actually drives the price
- Page count matters less than page types. Forty pages using six layouts is a smaller job than twelve pages that each need their own. Count templates, not URLs.
- Who writes the content. This is the most common budget surprise and the most common cause of delay. If nobody has been assigned to write it, the project will wait, and waiting costs more than writing.
- Integrations. A CRM, a booking system, a payment gateway or a customer portal each add work that has nothing to do with how the site looks.
- Migration and redirects. If URLs change and nobody maps them, you lose rankings you already own. This is cheap to plan and expensive to repair.
- Accessibility. If you are a public body, a contractor, or serving one, conformance is a requirement rather than a nicety, and it needs to be designed in.
Can AI redesign my existing website?
Partly, and it is worth being precise about which parts. AI tools are now genuinely good at producing layout options, first-draft copy, image treatments and code for individual components. That has taken real cost out of the middle of a project, and it is a large part of why the tiers above start lower than they did two years ago.
What AI does not decide is what the site is for: which of your services actually earn money, what your customers are confused by today, which pages carry rankings you cannot afford to lose, and what has to happen when someone fills in the form. A generated site that looks current and answers none of that is a more expensive mistake than the old site, because it also throws away whatever the old one was doing right.
The practical answer for most businesses: use AI to go faster inside a plan, not to replace having one.
When a redesign is the wrong purchase
Sometimes the site is not the problem. Before commissioning one, check whether the real issue is that nobody can find the site, that the content does not answer what buyers actually ask, or that a form has been quietly broken for months. Those are cheaper to fix than a rebuild, and a redesign that does not address them will disappoint at any price.
A redesign is the right call when the structure genuinely no longer fits the business, when the site cannot be edited without a developer, when it fails on mobile or accessibility, or when it is built on something unsupported.
What to ask any redesign vendor
- Which tier are you quoting? Template configuration and custom design are different products.
- Who writes the content, and when is it due? Get this in the plan, with dates.
- How are existing URLs handled? There should be a redirect map produced before build, not after launch.
- Can our team edit the site afterwards without you? If not, you have bought a dependency as well as a website.
- Who owns the domain, the hosting and the CMS account? All three should be in your name from the start.
- What happens to the analytics history? It should carry over, not restart.
If you want a straight answer about which tier your situation calls for, including the case where the answer is not a redesign at all, talk to our engineers. Related reading: what custom software costs and our UX and interface design work.