How much does a website redesign cost in the UK?

A website redesign in the UK costs anywhere from £3,000 to well over £40,000, and the gap between those numbers has very little to do with who you hire. It is set by how much of your current site survives, how much of the content already exists, and how much product sits behind the pages. Here are the three bands, what moves a project between them, what does not, and a way to work out which one you are in before you ask anyone for a quote.

The short answer

• Template refresh: £3,000 to £8,000. The structure stays, the surface changes. New type, colour and components on the pages you already have, usually on the platform you already run.
• Agency redesign: £15,000 to £40,000. The site is rethought from the structure up: who it is for, what each page has to say, the words, the design, the build and the migration.
• Product-led or multi-audience site: £40,000 and up. The website is part of a product, or it has to sell to several kinds of buyer at once, or both. Pricing pages, trial routes, documentation, integrations and a design system your engineers will extend.

There is a gap between £8,000 and £15,000, and it is deliberate. Projects quoted in it are usually one of the other two with something left out: a redesign with no content, or a refresh with a migration nobody has priced. If a quote lands there, ask what is missing.

Most of the redesigns we take on sit in the middle band, and the ones with product in them sit in the top one. Where you sit depends on four things.

What moves the price

Content

A redesign is a content project with a design project inside it. If the words exist and are good, the design can start on day one. If they do not, somebody has to write them, and that is weeks of work by someone who understands your buyer, not a line item called "copy". It is the single biggest reason two quotes for the same site are £10,000 apart. Ask who writes, and whether that is in the number.

How much of the old site survives

A refresh keeps the sitemap, the pages and most of the words, which is why it is cheap. The moment you decide the structure is wrong, that the pages a buyer needs are missing, or that the homepage describes the company from three years ago, you are no longer refreshing. Every page that gets rethought is a page that gets written, designed and built again.

Product depth

A brochure site and a site that sells software look similar in a sitemap and cost nothing alike. Pricing that has to be shown without a form in the way, a trial route separate from the sales route, documentation, a login, a status page, an integrations directory: each of these is a small product, and each one has states and edge cases that a page about your office does not. Servebolt went from concept to live in three months, and most of that time went on three buyer paths and a shorter route to trial, not on the homepage.

Migration and SEO

If the current site ranks for anything, someone has to find out what, map every old address to a new one, and check the map before launch and again the week after. Done well it is invisible. Done badly it costs you a year of traffic. It is also the part most often left out of a cheap quote, because it does not show up in the design. The3Key came out of its redesign with 77% more conversions, and the migration is a large part of why the traffic was still there to convert.

If a quote does not mention content or redirects, you have been quoted for the pictures.

What does not move the price

Page count, or not nearly as much as people think. A fifty-page site is not ten times the work of a five-page site, because most of those pages share a handful of templates. What costs is the number of different things a page has to do, not the number of pages. Three templates and forty pages is a smaller job than twelve templates and twelve pages.

Meetings. A weekly call does not make the site better and it does not make it more expensive, unless the agency is billing for attendance. What makes a project cost more is decisions that take weeks to arrive, and no amount of meetings fixes that. One person who can say yes does.

How to tell which band you are in

Three questions, answered honestly.

Does the structure still work? If a new buyer can find what you do, what it costs and why they should believe you within a screen or two, and the only complaint is that it looks dated, you are in the refresh band. If sales spends the first ten minutes of every call correcting the impression the site gave, you are not.

Do the words exist? Open your three most important pages and ask whether you would publish them tomorrow on a new site. If yes, the middle band is likely to be the lower half of its range. If no, plan for the upper half, or for writing them yourself first and losing a month.

Is there a product in the site? If buyers sign up, log in, see prices, read documentation or start a trial without talking to anyone, the website is doing product work, and it is priced as a product. That is the top band, and it is also where the return is largest, because every improvement compounds across every visitor.

If you want the longer version of what a redesign has to include, stage by stage, it is on the website redesign page, along with the five signs you need one and the one sign you do not.

Get a number before you talk to anyone

The fastest way to find out which band you are in is to write the brief: who the site is for, what it has to do, what you have already, what cannot move and what you will measure. Our free brief writer drafts one in about a minute, and you can send it to us or to anyone else. We price every redesign as a fixed scope with a date, and you get the number in the proposal, not after the project has started.