What a website redesign actually costs in 2026 (and what you get at each price)
Redesign quotes for the same site can differ by a factor of fifty, and the honest reason is that the word redesign is doing three different jobs. Knowing which one you are buying is what makes a price make sense.
Three different jobs wearing one word
Most quotes look absurd next to each other because they describe different work. A refresh changes how an existing site looks. A rebuild changes how it is built. A replatform moves it onto different software altogether. Prices differ by ten times or more across those three, before anybody has mentioned your logo.
Decide which of the three you are asking for before you ask for a number. If your site is slow because of the platform underneath it, a refresh is money spent on paint.
The price bands you will actually be quoted
These are typical 2026 ranges, not prices. Use them to sanity-check a quote rather than to negotiate with:
- DIY on a hosted builder: nothing to a few hundred dollars a year, plus your own time. Genuinely fine for a simple five-page site.
- Freelance designer or small studio: roughly $1,500 to $8,000 for a small business site of five to fifteen pages.
- Established agency: roughly $10,000 to $50,000, and higher when the site carries ecommerce, booking or several languages.
- Enterprise replatform: $50,000 upward, usually measured in quarters rather than weeks.
What moves you up or down inside a band
Four things decide where you land: how many page designs are genuinely unique, whether the words are being written for you, whether existing content has to be migrated, and how many integrations have to still work on launch day.
A site with one layout used well costs far less than a site with six bespoke pages, even when they look similar to a visitor.
The extras that appear on the invoice later
Ask for every one of these as a line item before you sign. A vague quote is not a cheaper quote, it is an unpriced one:
- Copywriting, which is the most common surprise line of all.
- Photography and illustration, if your site depends on looking credible.
- Migration of existing pages, with redirects so you do not lose what you have already earned in search.
- Speed and accessibility work, rather than a redesign that leaves the old problems in place.
- A handover period where somebody answers your questions without raising a new invoice.
Redesign it, or repair the site you have?
Before spending four figures, spend thirty minutes finding out what is actually wrong. A surprising share of sites that feel tired are failing for something unglamorous: pages that take four seconds to show anything, a headline a stranger cannot parse, a form nobody trusts.
If the scores are poor across the board, a rebuild is justified. If they are decent and only the look is dated, you may be buying a refresh, a sharper headline and better photography, and keeping the difference.
How to compare two quotes fairly
Once the prices are in front of you, these five questions separate a considered quote from a hopeful one:
- Ask both to price the same list of pages. Unmatched scope is the usual reason two quotes look incomparable.
- Ask what happens to your existing rankings after launch. The answer should involve a redirect map.
- Ask who owns the design files, the code and the hosting account afterwards.
- Ask what the finished site will score on speed and accessibility. A redesign that ships slow on mobile is not finished.
- Ask for the ongoing cost in writing as well as the build cost.
What good value actually looks like
The best work is almost never the cheapest quote. It is the quote that names the problem your site actually has, prices the fix honestly, and leaves you owning the result.
Run our free audit on your own site first and take the report into the conversation. A designer who welcomes the numbers is a designer worth hiring.
Key takeaways
- Refresh, rebuild and replatform are three different budgets hiding behind one word.
- Typical 2026 bands: a few hundred DIY, $1,500 to $8,000 freelance, $10,000 to $50,000 agency, $50,000 upward for a replatform.
- Copy, photography, migration and redirects are the lines that turn a quote into a bill.
- Fix what the audit says is broken before paying to change how the site looks.
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