How much does a website redesign cost?

The short answer

Budget for a new site of the same scope, then add the cost of the move. The two sources that publish a redesign figure agree on the direction:

• Germany: Sellwerk tells small businesses to expect the cost of a new build plus 10 to 20% for content transfer, a redirect plan and search protection.
• France: La Fabrique du Net, which collects real agency project budgets, finds a redesign costs about 40% more than a new site: a median of €7,000 for a redesign against €5,000 for a simple new build.

We found no redesign-specific range for the US or the UK that we could check, so the honest way to budget there is the same: take the new-build range for your scope and add the migration work.

For your own scope, the website cost calculator builds the new-site figure line by line, and our guide to what a website costs in 2026 explains each range.

Why a redesign costs more than a new site

A new site starts from nothing. A redesign starts from a site that already has pages people visit, links from other sites and a history with search engines, and all of that has to survive the move. La Fabrique du Net names the extra work: taking over what exists, meaning the content, the search history, the redirects and sometimes a data migration, on top of the design work. Sellwerk adds a warning: the migration line is the one most often cut from a quote, and it is the most common cause of a drop in visibility after launch.

• Content audit and transfer. Deciding which pages stay, merge or go, then moving and reformatting them.
• Redirect plan. Every old address that changes needs a 301 redirect to its new home, or visitors and search engines hit a dead end.
• Search protection. Titles, descriptions, structured data and internal links carried over, and a check that nothing blocks crawling at launch.
• Data migration. Products, customers, orders, posts or member accounts moved from the old platform to the new one.
• Tracking. Analytics, conversion goals and ad tags set up again so the numbers stay comparable.

Refresh, redesign or rebuild

The word "redesign" covers three different jobs, and they are priced very differently:

• Refresh: new look on the same platform and the same structure. The cheapest, and often enough when the site works but looks dated.
• Redesign: new design and a new page structure, usually new templates, with the content rewritten or reorganized. This is what the figures above describe.
• Rebuild or replatform: a new system underneath, for example moving to a new CMS or store platform. The most expensive, because everything is migrated.

Before you ask for quotes, find out which one you need. The free website grader checks indexing, redirects, links, titles and share tags on your current site, which shows whether a repair would fix the problem.

How to redesign an existing website without losing traffic

1. List what you have. Export every current URL and note which ones bring visits, links and enquiries. The broken link checker and the meta tag checker show what each page has today.
2. Decide what stays. Keep, merge or retire each page, and keep the addresses of the pages that perform.
3. Map old to new. Write down the new address for every old one that changes.
4. Build and test before launch. Check the new templates on phones, speed and accessibility, and validate structured data with the schema markup validator.
5. Launch with redirects in place. Set the 301 redirects and test them with the redirect checker, and make sure robots.txt is not still blocking the site.
6. Watch the first weeks. Look for broken links, missing pages and drops in search traffic, and fix them while they are fresh.

How often should you redesign a website?

There is no fixed cycle, and redesigning on a timer wastes money. Redesign when the site stops doing its job:

• It is slow or awkward to use on a phone.
• It no longer matches your brand, your offer or your prices.
• The platform is out of date, insecure or hard for your team to edit.
• Enquiries or sales from the site have dropped and the cause is the site, not the market.

If only one of these is true, a targeted fix is usually cheaper than a full redesign.

What a redesign quote should include

1. The scope: refresh, redesign or rebuild, with the pages and features listed.
2. The migration work as its own line: content, redirects, search checks and any data.
3. Who writes or rewrites the content.
4. What you own at the end: design files, code, domain and accounts.
5. The running costs after launch.
6. A fixed price for the scope described, so a missing line cannot reappear as an extra.

Sources