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.
First, the test almost nobody runs
Open your analytics. 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. That is SEO work, not design work.
Those two problems get the same complaint from owners: “the site is not bringing anything in.” They need opposite spending. Getting this wrong is the most expensive mistake in the whole exercise, and it costs nothing to check.
We look at exactly this in a free audit, and we tell people not to rebuild more often than you might expect from a studio that sells rebuilds.
UK redesign prices in 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. It is the work described in the next section.
The part of a redesign that has no equivalent in a new build
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.
Every URL that changes needs a permanent redirect to its replacement. Every page that ranks needs its content carried across rather than trimmed to fit a prettier template. Structured data, page titles, internal links, image filenames, the sitemap. All of it has to land on the other side intact. On a fifty-page site that is a day or two of unglamorous mapping work before anyone designs anything.
Studios that quote a redesign as though it were a new build are usually planning to skip this. You will not notice at launch. You will notice about six weeks later.
How to not lose your rankings
This is the fear that stops most redesigns, and it is a reasonable one. Traffic collapses after a rebuild are common. They are also almost entirely preventable.
Four things do most of the protecting. Keep the URLs identical wherever you can, because a URL that does not change cannot break. Where a URL must change, map old to new one to one and serve a 301. Never a bulk redirect to the homepage, which Google reads as a soft 404. Move the actual words across: pages rank for text, and “we tightened the copy” is how a page that ranked stops ranking. And change one thing at a time. A new design, a new platform and a new domain in the same week leaves you with nothing to diagnose when the graph drops.
Expect a wobble anyway. Two to six weeks of unsettled positions after a real rebuild is normal while Google recrawls. What is not normal is a decline that is still there in month three.
Stay on your platform, or move?
The platform question decides more of the budget than the design does, so it is worth answering before you brief anyone.
Staying put is the cheap answer and often the right one. If WordPress or Shopify does what you need and the only problem is that the theme is tired, a new design on the same platform keeps your content, your URLs and your team's muscle memory intact. Nobody has to learn anything.
Moving is worth it when the platform is the thing holding you back: 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 in well under a second. That is web development work rather than theme work, and it is priced accordingly.
Wix and Squarespace are their own case. You cannot really redesign them beyond what the editor allows, so the question is not redesign versus rebuild but whether you have outgrown the tool.
What should be in the quote
Ask for these in writing before you sign, because their absence is what separates a £3,500 quote from a £6,000 one, and you will not spot the difference on the page.
A URL map, old to new, 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: kept live somewhere, or gone. A launch checklist covering redirects, sitemap, analytics and search console. And a number for 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.
Repair or rebuild?
A repair is usually right when the bones are sound: the site is fast enough, it works on a phone, and the problem is that three pages read badly and the enquiry form is buried. That is a week of work, not a project.
Rebuild when you are fighting the platform rather than the design. Page loads you cannot fix because of the theme. A CMS nobody can edit without breaking the layout. A stack whose plugins stopped being updated years ago. Or the plainest signal: your developer says “that will be difficult” to requests that should be trivial.
Age alone is not a reason. A clean 2019 site that loads in a second and converts is not a problem waiting to be solved.
If it does turn out to be a rebuild, our website redesign page sets out how we run one, including what happens to your existing rankings.
What we would do first with your budget
Fix the enquiry path before touching anything visual. Most sites we look at lose people at the same three points: 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 and often move enquiries more than a redesign does.
Then rewrite the top three pages, and only then talk about the design. It is a duller order than most agencies propose. It also means that if you stop after step two, you are still better off than when you started.