Website Redesign Cost: What You Pay For When the Site Already Exists

Website redesign cost depends less on the new design and more on what you're carrying over: how many pages and projects move, whether the copy gets rewritten, and how many old URLs need redirects. A small studio site with a handful of service pages and a modest portfolio sits at the low end. A site with years of project pages, blog posts, and changed addresses costs more. Our redesigns start from $1,000, the same starting price as a new site, and the final figure depends on pages and features.

How much does a website redesign cost on the market?

Market prices for a redesign follow general web design rates, because most of the work is the same: structure, design, build, and launch. What changes is the extra work of moving old content safely.

Two public data points give a sense of the spread. Clutch, which collects verified client reviews of agencies, reports that agencies in the U.S. typically bill $100 to $149 an hour and that most web design projects reviewed on the platform cost less than $10,000. At the other end, Upwork says web designers on its marketplace typically charge $15 to $30 an hour, based on historical contracts worldwide.

Neither figure tells you what your redesign will cost. An hourly rate means little until you know how many hours the migration takes, and that's what the rest of this page is about. If you're starting from scratch with no site at all, our article on what a new website costs covers that case.

What drives website redesign pricing

Five things move the number up or down. Two of them, migration and redirects, don't exist on a new build at all.

Content migration

Every page you keep has to be moved, reformatted, and checked in the new layout. On a design studio or landscaper's site, the heavy part is usually the portfolio. Thirty project pages with fifteen photos each is 450 images to resize, rename, and place, plus the captions and project descriptions that go with them.

Blog posts are the other big pile. Old posts often contain broken embeds, outdated prices, or photos hosted somewhere that no longer exists. Moving them as-is is cheap. Fixing them as you go costs more.

URL changes and 301 redirects

If a page's address changes, the old address needs a permanent redirect to the new one. Google's guidance on site moves says 301 and other permanent redirects don't cause a loss in PageRank and recommends keeping them for at least a year.

The work here is a URL map: a list of every old address and where it should point. A 15-page site takes very little time to map. A site that's been around for eight years, with a blog, tag pages, and two previous redesigns, can have hundreds of URLs, some of which nobody remembers creating.

Keeping vs. rewriting copy

Keeping your existing text is the cheapest path. Rewriting it costs more but is often the main reason to redesign. Plenty of studio sites still describe services the owner stopped offering, or open with "Welcome to our website."

We write copy from your answers to a questionnaire, so a rewrite doesn't mean you write it yourself. You check the facts and approve. Where the old copy ranks well and still reads right, we'd keep it.

Photos

Photography is often the hidden cost. If your project photos are strong, they move over. If they're dark phone shots from 2017, the new design will make them look worse, not better. Professional photos are a separate cost from the website, and worth budgeting for before the redesign rather than after.

New features

A redesign is often when owners add things: an online booking form, a client questionnaire, a Spanish or Russian version, a project filter by style or by town. Each adds to scope. If the old site had a feature you're keeping, such as a newsletter signup, it needs to be rebuilt and tested on the new site too.

When a redesign costs less than a new site, and when it costs more

A redesign costs less when the old site already has solid copy, good photos, and a sensible page structure. In that case, most of the work is design and build, with content moving over in a fairly straight line.

It costs more when the old site is large and messy. Say you run a landscaping company that's published a project page for every patio since 2016, plus a blog. Before anyone designs anything, someone has to decide what stays, what merges, and what goes. That decision work is real time.

There's one case where we'd suggest treating it as a new site: when almost nothing from the old site is worth keeping. If the copy, photos, and structure all need replacing, calling it a redesign doesn't save money. It just adds a migration step for content you're going to throw away.

A pre-quote inventory for studio and landscaping sites

You'll get a more accurate quote, from us or anyone, if you know what you have before you ask. Here's what to count:

1. Total pages, including blog posts. Your Google Search Console account or a site search (site:yourdomain.com) gives a rough count.
2. Portfolio or project pages, and the average number of photos on each.
3. Pages that bring traffic. In Search Console, the Pages tab of the Performance report shows which ones get clicks.
4. Pages you want to drop or merge.
5. Whether the domain stays the same.
6. Features you use now: forms, booking, newsletter, embedded reviews, a Houzz or Instagram feed.
7. Features you want to add.
8. Whether the copy stays, gets edited, or gets rewritten.
9. Who owns the domain, hosting, and current site accounts, and whether you have the logins.

The last point slows more redesigns than anything else. If a former contractor registered your domain under their own account, getting it back can take a while. Sort that out first.

Steps that protect your search traffic during a redesign

Nobody can promise that rankings will stay the same after a redesign. Google itself says you may experience ranking fluctuations while it recrawls and reindexes the site. What you can do is remove the avoidable risks. These are the steps we take on a redesign:

1. Keep URLs the same wherever it makes sense. No redirect is safer than any redirect.
2. Map every old URL that changes to its closest new page, with a 301 redirect.
3. Move existing texts from pages that bring traffic, rather than dropping them for shorter copy.
4. Update internal links to point at new URLs directly, not through redirects.
5. Let deleted pages return a 404 instead of sending them all to the homepage. Google warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page, such as the homepage, can be treated as a soft 404.
6. Publish an updated sitemap and submit it in Search Console after launch.

If the domain itself changes, there's one more step: the Change of Address tool in Search Console. Google says you only need it when moving from one domain or subdomain to another.

Questions to ask before you accept a redesign quote

Two quotes for the same redesign can differ a lot because they include different things. Ask these before you compare:

• Does the price include moving all existing pages, or only the main ones?
• Who handles the redirect map, and will I get a copy of it?
• Is copywriting included, or do I supply the text?
• How many rounds of revisions are included?
• What happens to blog posts and old project pages?
• Who owns the finished site and the accounts it runs on?
• What isn't included? (Photography, logo work, and ongoing edits are common exclusions.)

A quote that doesn't mention redirects at all is a warning sign for any site older than a couple of years.

How we price a redesign

Our redesigns start from $1,000, same as a new site. The final price depends on how many pages move, whether we rewrite the copy, and which features you need. What's included, the schedule, how payments are split, and how many rounds of changes you get are all written into a proposal before work starts, so the price you agree to is the price you pay for that scope.

Interior design studios and landscaping companies have been our focus for 10 years. A redesign with us includes the page plan, new copy, an original design, the build, a phone-friendly layout, basic SEO, and the launch itself. Most of the process runs in writing, and calls are optional. You can see what a full studio site includes on our pages about websites for interior designers and websites for landscaping companies.

Related guides

• Our website redesign services
• A step-by-step redesign checklist
• Moving from Squarespace to Webflow is a rebuild