Ask three web designers what a website redesign costs and you'll get three wildly different numbers, and none of them will be lying. The range is genuinely that wide, because 'website redesign' can mean a weekend project on a drag-and-drop builder or a months-long custom build with photography, copywriting, and ongoing support built in. If you're budgeting for 2024, it helps to understand what actually drives the price before you start collecting quotes.

What Drives the Price

The biggest cost factor isn't design taste, it's scope. A handful of things push a project from the low end toward the high end: how many pages you need, whether the site needs to sell products directly, whether someone needs to write your content from scratch versus you providing it, whether you need custom photography, and how much ongoing work is built in versus a one-time handoff. A five-page site for a local service business with content you already have is a fundamentally different project than a fifty-product online store with custom features and a content strategy behind it.

Rough Ranges You'll Actually See

These vary by market and by who you're talking to, but as a general shape of what's out there:

  • DIY website builders (Squarespace, Wix, and similar): often free to a few hundred dollars a year, if you're doing the design work yourself. Fine for very simple needs, limited if you want something that stands out or need real customization.
  • Template-based small business sites built by a freelancer or small agency: commonly a few thousand dollars, using a pre-built theme customized with your branding and content.
  • Custom-designed sites built around your specific business and goals, with original design work, strategy, and copywriting support: typically several thousand dollars and up, scaling with complexity.
  • Ecommerce sites, especially with custom features, inventory integration, or a larger product catalog: generally the highest tier, often well into five figures depending on scope.

Questions to Ask Before You Sign Anything

A quote by itself doesn't tell you much. Ask what's included: is content writing part of it, or are you expected to supply every word? Is there a revision limit? Who owns the final files if you ever want to switch providers? What happens after launch, is there support, or are you on your own the day it goes live? And be skeptical of quotes that seem far below everyone else's; a cheap redesign that isn't mobile-friendly, loads slowly, or needs to be redone in a year isn't actually cheap. The right budget is the one that matches what the site actually needs to do for your business, not the lowest number you can find.

It also helps to separate the build cost from the ongoing cost. A site can be affordable to build and expensive to maintain, or the reverse, depending on the platform it's built on, whether it needs regular software updates, and whether you're paying someone monthly to make small changes. Ask what a typical month looks like after launch: who updates a price if it changes, who fixes it if a plugin breaks, and what that costs. A number that only covers the first ninety days isn't the real number.