Short answer: a redesign is not just a new look. What it costs depends on the state of your current site, how much content has to move or be rewritten, the UX problems you are fixing, the CMS, the SEO migration and redirects, integrations, performance work and how much new development is involved. As a guide, a UK website redesign costs £3,500 to £9,000 for a typical small business site in 2026. A visual refresh on the platform you already have starts around £1,200. Moving to a new stack, with content and URLs migrated properly, runs £6,000 to £15,000, and replatforming a shop goes past £30,000.
Before any of that, a question worth sitting with: are you sure the design is the problem? Plenty of redesigns fix something that was never broken and quietly break something that worked. This guide covers what a redesign includes, when to rebuild instead, and how to scope the project so the quotes you receive can be compared.
What does a website redesign include?
A proper redesign covers more than the screens you see. A quote should account for:
- A review of what the current site does well and badly: analytics, enquiries, search visibility and speed.
- New structure and navigation where the old one makes people work too hard.
- New page designs for desktop and mobile, shaped by what the content actually needs. Our web design page covers how we approach this.
- Content: carrying existing pages across and rewriting the ones that underperform.
- Build work, on your current CMS or a new one.
- SEO migration: URL mapping, redirects, metadata, structured data and the sitemap.
- Testing, launch, and a period afterwards in which problems get fixed.
Our website redesign service page sets out how we run each of these.
Redesign vs rebuild: when each is the right choice
Start with the test almost nobody runs. Open your analytics and find how many people arrived last month and how many made contact. If a hundred people landed and none enquired, the site has a conversion problem, and a new coat of paint will not touch it. If four people landed and one enquired, the site is fine and you have a traffic problem, which is SEO work rather than design work. Owners describe both problems the same way, that the site is not bringing anything in, and they need opposite spending.
A redesign on your current platform is usually right when the bones are sound: the site is fast enough, it works on a phone, and the problems are structure, copy and design. Staying put keeps your content, your URLs and your team’s habits intact.
A rebuild is right when the platform itself blocks the fixes: a page builder that fights you, plugins nobody maintains, a Core Web Vitals score you cannot lift because the theme loads half a megabyte of JavaScript you did not ask for. We move most brochure sites to static builds for exactly this reason: there is no database to hack, hosting costs a few pounds, and pages load fast. That is web development work rather than theme work, and it is priced accordingly.
Wix and Squarespace are their own case. You cannot redesign them beyond what the editor allows, so the real question is whether you have outgrown the tool; our Wix and Squarespace comparison helps with that call. Our guide on when to rebuild a website goes through the warning signs one by one.
What affects website redesign cost?
Typical UK prices for 2026:
| What you are doing | Typical UK price | Typical delivery |
|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh on the current platform | £1,200 – £3,000 | 1–2 weeks |
| Redesign with new structure and copy | £3,500 – £9,000 | 3–6 weeks |
| Rebuild on a new stack, content migrated | £6,000 – £15,000 | 5–9 weeks |
| E-commerce replatform | £10,000 – £30,000+ | 8–16 weeks |
These sit slightly above the equivalent numbers in our guide to what a website costs in the UK, and the gap is not margin. Building a site from nothing is, in one narrow sense, easier: there is no past to carry. A redesign has a past, and the past is where the hours go. The main cost drivers:
- Size and state of the current site: fifty pages with years of content take far longer to map, migrate and test than ten.
- Content: moving text across is cheap; rewriting it is not. Decide early which pages keep their copy.
- UX and structure: new navigation and page templates cost more than restyling the existing ones.
- Platform: staying on your current CMS is cheaper than moving, unless the CMS is what is holding you back.
- SEO migration and redirects: every changed URL needs mapping and a redirect. On a fifty-page site that is a day or two of unglamorous work before anyone designs anything.
- Integrations and performance: forms, booking, CRM and analytics all have to be reconnected, plus any speed work the old theme made impossible.
Studios that quote a redesign as though it were a new build are usually planning to skip the migration work. You will not notice at launch. You will notice about six weeks later.
Design-only refresh versus full website rebuild
The three options differ in scope as much as in price. The table above shows what each typically costs; this one shows what you actually get.
| Visual refresh | Redesign | Full rebuild | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design | New styling on the existing templates | New structure, navigation and page designs | New design on new templates |
| Content | Kept as it is | Kept, with weak pages rewritten | Migrated, often restructured |
| CMS / platform | Same | Usually the same | New platform or stack |
| URLs | Unchanged | Mostly unchanged | Often change, so each one needs a redirect |
| SEO risk | Low | Moderate, manageable with a URL map | Highest, needs a full migration plan |
| Best for | A tired look on a site that works | A site that works technically but converts poorly | A platform that blocks speed, editing or growth |
Not sure whether you need a refresh, a redesign or a rebuild?
Send us the address of your current site. The first audit is free: we spend 20 to 30 minutes on it and email you the biggest problems we find, so you can see what kind of work the site really needs before you ask anyone for a quote.
Content, CMS, integrations, performance and accessibility
Content: Pages rank for their text. Carry the words of every page that brings in traffic across as they are, and rewrite the ones that do not. “We tightened the copy” is how a page that ranked stops ranking.
CMS: You can often keep the CMS you have. If your team is comfortable in WordPress and the problem is the theme, a new design on the same platform is the cheaper route. If editing is painful, or the site is slow because of the platform, moving is worth pricing.
Integrations: List every form, booking tool, CRM connection, tracking script and newsletter sign-up before the project starts. Each one has to be rebuilt or reconnected and tested, and the forgotten ones are where launches go wrong.
Performance: A redesign is the cheapest moment to fix speed, because the templates are being rebuilt anyway. Put a target in the brief, for example passing Core Web Vitals on mobile, rather than hoping for it.
Accessibility: Colour contrast, keyboard navigation, alt text and readable form errors are easier to build in than to retrofit. Ask each supplier how they check them.
SEO-safe migration: redirects, canonical URLs, metadata, sitemap and preserving useful ranking history
Losing search traffic is the fear that stops most redesigns, and it is a reasonable one. A careful migration cannot guarantee that every position stays where it is, but it removes most of the avoidable risk. It needs:
- A URL audit: a list of every URL with traffic, links or rankings, taken from analytics, Search Console and a crawl of the old site.
- Redirects: keep URLs identical wherever you can. Where one must change, map old to new one to one and serve a 301. Never redirect everything to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404.
- Canonical URLs: each new page points its canonical tag at itself on the live domain, not at a staging copy or an old address.
- Metadata and structured data: titles, descriptions and schema carried across or improved, never dropped because the new template had no field for them.
- Sitemap and internal links: a new XML sitemap submitted on launch day, and internal links pointing at the new URLs rather than leaning on redirects.
- Monitoring: Search Console checked for crawl errors, 404s and indexing changes for several weeks after launch.
Change one thing at a time where you can. A new design, a new platform and a new domain in the same week leave you nothing to diagnose if the graph drops. Expect some movement anyway: two to six weeks of unsettled positions after a real rebuild is normal while Google recrawls. A decline that is still there in month three means something in the migration needs fixing.
Warning signs that a redesign is needed
- Visitors arrive but rarely enquire, and they leave from the same few pages.
- The site is slow on a phone, and the theme or builder stops you fixing it.
- Simple text changes need a developer, or nobody dares touch the CMS.
- What you sell has changed and the pages still describe the old business.
- The theme or plugins are no longer maintained, or security updates keep breaking things.
- The site does not work properly on mobile, or fails basic accessibility checks.
Age on its own is not a warning sign. A fast site that converts does not need replacing because it is five years old. Fix the enquiry path first: on many of the sites we look at, the phone number is not tappable, the form asks for things nobody wants to type, and the page never says what happens after you press send. Those take hours to fix and can move enquiries more than a redesign does.
How to scope a redesign project before requesting a quote
A brief of one or two pages makes quotes comparable and keeps them honest. Include:
- The current site address, the platform it runs on, and who has access to it.
- What is wrong today, in numbers where you have them: traffic, enquiries, speed.
- The pages that bring in traffic or enquiries and must be protected.
- What stays (content, CMS, domain) and what is allowed to change.
- The integrations and tools the site connects to.
- Who writes or approves new copy.
- Your deadline and budget band.
Then ask each supplier to confirm the following in writing before you sign, because their absence is what separates a £3,500 quote from a £6,000 one: a URL map with the redirects listed, confirmation that page text is being migrated rather than rewritten to fit the layout, who writes any new copy and whether that is in the price, what happens to the old site, a launch checklist covering redirects, sitemap, analytics and Search Console, and how long after launch they will still fix things. A studio that shrugs at that list is quoting you for a new theme and calling it a redesign.
Two of our case studies show this kind of work: Barsion, a bilingual site rebuilt on a lighter stack, and Geek Foundation, a complete redesign that brings complex services into a clear, responsive site.