How much does a website redesign cost in the UK?

A website redesign costs about the same as a new website. With us that’s from £5,000, most land between £8,000 and £12,000, and it’s £12,000+ once there’s a shop, a booking system or a member area involved. Those numbers are on our pricing page and they don’t drop because you’ve already got a website.

That surprises people. You’ve got a website, the words are written, the photos exist, so surely it’s cheaper? Not by much. And a redesign comes with a few jobs a brand-new website doesn’t have, which is what most of this post is about.

(If you’re starting from nothing, I wrote about how much a website costs in the UK. This one’s for people with a website that’s getting on a bit.)

Why does a redesign cost the same as a new website?

Because in practice you’re getting a new website. It gets designed and built from the start, and the old code goes in the bin, because whatever made the old site slow or awkward is normally baked right into it.

What you already have does help. If your words and photos are good, that saves time. Be honest with yourself about whether they are, mind. Copy written years ago for a business that’s since changed isn’t much use, and neither are the stock photos of people shaking hands in an office you’ve never been in.

The things that move the price are the same as any build:

• How many pages you need
• Custom features like booking systems, quote calculators or login areas
• Selling online
• Connecting it to your other software (CRM, email marketing, payments, accounts)
• Copywriting and photography
• Moving your old content across
• How complex the design is

One of those matters a lot more on a redesign than on a new build.

What’s different about a redesign?

Moving your old content

A five-page site is quick to move. Hundreds of blog posts or a big product catalogue is a job in itself, done by hand, and it’s one of the main things that pushes a redesign up the range.

It’s also a good excuse for a clear-out. Loads of older websites are dragging round pages nobody’s looked at in years. Don’t pay to move those.

Redirecting your old URLs

Agencies skip this all the time.

Your old website has pages Google knows about and people have linked to over the years. If the new website changes those addresses and nobody sets up redirects, Google hits a dead page, and the rankings you’ve built up can go with it. So every old address that matters needs pointing at its new home.

It’s boring work. Skip it and you can lose search traffic that took you years to get, the week you launch a website you paid good money for.

Keeping what already works

Before anything gets binned, look at what the old site’s doing right. Which pages bring people in from Google, which ones lead to enquiries, what people are searching for when they find you.

A redesign that throws all that away because the new one looks nicer is money down the drain. Looks don’t count for much if the thing doesn’t work.

Tracking

Your old site probably has Google Analytics on it, maybe Google Ads conversion tracking, maybe a Facebook pixel somebody added in 2019 and forgot about. If that isn’t set up again on the new site, you launch blind. Your ads carry on spending and you’ve no idea whether any of it’s working.

Check it all on launch day. Then check it again.

How often should you redesign your website?

Every three to five years. Don’t leave it eight.

Things move quickly. What looked sharp five years ago looks tired now, phones keep changing, Google keeps changing what it cares about, and the plugins your old site leans on stop getting updated one by one. Leave it long enough and it ends up out of date, full of broken links and a much easier target for hackers.

A website is never finished, either. Between redesigns it needs looking after: updates, security, backups, small improvements as you go. Ours are looked after by our sister company, Better Hosting, from £150 a month plus VAT. Look after a website properly and the redesign every few years is a lot less painful, because you’re not fixing eight years of neglect at the same time.

Signs it’s time for a redesign

• It’s slow, especially on a phone. If it takes more than a second or so to load, I’d bet you’re losing people.
• It looks dated next to your competitors.
• Your business has changed and the website still describes the old one.
• You can’t update anything yourself without ringing somebody.
• Enquiries have dried up, or you’re paying for ads and nothing’s coming back.
• It’s been hacked, or it’s built on something that doesn’t get updated anymore.
• It’s more than five years old and nobody’s really touched it.

If you’re not sure, we’ve got a page on whether you need a new website that goes through the signs.

When is a refresh enough?

You don’t always need the full thing. If the site’s only a few years old, loads fast and is built on something solid, a refresh will do the job. That could mean rewriting the homepage and main service pages, getting some proper photos done, tidying the menu and making sure the forms and tracking actually work.

The words make the biggest difference. Rewriting a homepage in plain English, so people can tell what you do within a few seconds of landing, can do more for enquiries than a whole new design. A refresh like that is smaller work than a rebuild, so it costs less, though I couldn’t tell you how much without seeing the site.

A refresh won’t cut it when the problem is how the site’s built. If it’s slow because of the theme, the hosting and a pile of plugins, new photos won’t fix that. Same if you’ve outgrown a website builder, or you’d be changing so much that you’re rebuilding it piece by piece anyway. At that point patching it costs about as much as a new one, and you still end up with an old website.

Wolf Laundry is the one I always come back to. They were spending £3,000 a month on Google Ads with zero leads, because the website took ten seconds to load and over half the people clicking never saw it. No amount of new copy was fixing that. We rebuilt it, it loads in about a second, and they went to 30 to 60 leads a month within weeks. It’s 150 to 200 a month now.

So what should you budget for a redesign?

The same as a new website. From £5,000 for something smaller, £8,000 to £12,000 for most established businesses, and £12,000+ if there’s a shop, bookings or other custom bits. If you’ve got hundreds of pages to move, expect to be further up the range.

And if your website’s eight years old and you’re reading this wondering whether it counts…it does.