Two Different Purchases
"Redesign" describes two things with very different price tags. Confusing them is why quotes for the same request arrive four times apart.
A refresh keeps your structure and platform, and updates the visual layer. A rebuild changes the architecture — what pages exist, how they relate, how content is modelled — and usually the platform with it. Before requesting quotes, decide which you are buying, because the answer determines everything else.
What It Costs
| Scope | United States | United Kingdom |
|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh on existing structure | $2,000 to $6,000 | £1,500 to £4,000 |
| Redesign of key pages only | $4,000 to $10,000 | £3,000 to £7,000 |
| Full redesign and rebuild | $8,000 to $25,000 | £5,000 to £15,000 |
| Large content site or complex commerce | $25,000 to $60,000+ | £15,000 to £40,000+ |
| Migration surcharge on a site with real traffic | add 10 to 20 percent | |
These sit alongside the new-build ranges in our full pricing breakdown for the US and UK. Redesigns are rarely much cheaper than new builds at the same scope, because the design and build work is identical and there is additional work handling what already exists.
Reasons That Justify the Spend
- The site does not work on mobile, where most of your traffic is. Not "works but is awkward" — actually fails.
- It is slow and the cause is structural. If the fix requires rebuilding rather than optimising, that is a legitimate trigger.
- The brand has genuinely changed — new positioning, new market, new offer — and the site now describes a company that no longer exists.
- You cannot update it without paying someone, and that friction is preventing marketing from happening.
- The structure is wrong. Your services have changed, the navigation no longer reflects what you sell, and no amount of restyling fixes a wrong information architecture.
- It is on unmaintained technology with security implications, which is a risk question rather than a design one.
- Measured conversion problems that trace to specific structural failures, evidenced by analytics rather than by opinion.
Reasons That Usually Do Not
- "It looks dated." Sometimes valid, frequently a refresh at a quarter of the cost.
- A new marketing hire wants to. Common, understandable, and rarely the highest-return use of the budget in their first quarter.
- A competitor launched something. Their site may be performing worse than yours. You cannot tell from the outside.
- Traffic is falling. Diagnose first. Falling traffic is usually a search or content problem, and a redesign can easily make it worse — see how redesigns destroy rankings.
- Leadership is bored of it. The people who look at your site most often are the ones who work there, and their fatigue is not a customer signal.
Diagnose Before You Spend
Run this before commissioning anything. It takes a week and regularly saves the entire budget.
- Is there enough qualified traffic? If not, the problem is acquisition and a redesign will not help.
- Where do visitors leave? Analytics will tell you. If they leave from one page, fix that page.
- How does mobile compare with desktop? A large gap points at a specific fixable failure, not a general one.
- How fast is it, on mobile, on a real connection? Speed problems are usually solvable without redesigning.
- Do the forms work? Genuinely test them. Broken enquiry forms are astonishingly common and account for more lost leads than design ever does.
- Can a stranger tell what you sell in ten seconds? Ask five people. If not, the problem is messaging, which is a copywriting cost rather than a design one.
- Are you ranking for anything relevant? If not, that is content and technical SEO work.
Our longer diagnostic for the specific case of healthy traffic and no enquiries is here.
Cheaper Interventions That Often Solve It
| Intervention | Typical cost | When it is the right answer |
|---|---|---|
| Rewrite the homepage and key service copy | $1,000 to $3,500 | Visitors do not understand what you sell |
| Performance optimisation | $800 to $3,000 | Site is slow but structurally sound |
| Redesign the two highest-value pages | $2,000 to $5,000 | Drop-off is concentrated, not general |
| Fix mobile-specific failures | $800 to $2,500 | Mobile converts far worse than desktop |
| Add proof, pricing clarity and trust signals | $1,000 to $3,000 | Traffic is qualified but hesitant |
| Technical SEO remediation | $1,500 to $5,000 | Pages are not being found at all |
Any of these can be done in weeks, measured independently, and stopped if they do not work. A full redesign offers none of those properties.
If You Do Redesign, Do These Things
- Record the baseline first — traffic, rankings, conversion rate, speed — or you will never know whether it worked.
- Keep what performs. Pages that rank and convert should be improved, not replaced on principle.
- Map every URL and redirect it, before launch.
- Sort content before design. Designing around content that does not exist yet is the main cause of overruns.
- Set performance targets in writing and hold the build to them.
- Plan a stabilisation period, not a launch party. The two weeks after go-live are part of the project.
- Budget for the next two years of improvement, so you never need another full redesign.
The Pattern Worth Adopting
The businesses spending least on their websites over a decade are not the ones who buy cheap. They are the ones who never let the site decay far enough to need rescuing — continuous small improvements, content kept current, performance monitored, structure adjusted as the business changes. Redesign becomes an occasional deliberate reset rather than an emergency.
Kalex Studio takes on both — full rebuilds where they are warranted, and targeted work where a rebuild would be a waste of your money. If you are not sure which you need, send us the URL and what you think is wrong, and we will tell you what we would actually do.