A redesign quote is the easiest place in web design to overpay or underpay, because "redesign" can mean anything from a fresh coat of paint to a gut renovation. Two businesses can both buy "a website redesign" and one pays $1,500 while the other pays $25,000, and both prices might be fair for what was delivered.
So before you collect quotes, get clear on what you're actually buying. There are three different projects hiding inside the word "redesign," and they cost very different amounts.
The three projects hiding inside "redesign"
1. The refresh (partial redesign): roughly $500 to $3,000
The structure stays. Same pages, same platform, same content, mostly. You're updating the visual layer: new colors and fonts, better photos, a modernized homepage, maybe a cleaner navigation.
- What it fixes: a site that looks dated but works fine.
- What it doesn't fix: rankings, slow load times, missing pages, a site that never generated leads in the first place.
- Fair price range: $500 to $3,000 for a typical small business site, depending on page count and whether new photography or copy is involved.
The refresh is the most over-sold project in the industry. If your site doesn't bring in customers, making it prettier will not change that, and a designer who takes your money for a refresh without asking "is this site producing leads today?" is solving the wrong problem on purpose or by accident.
2. The full redesign: roughly $2,000 to $15,000
New design, restructured pages, rewritten content, usually staying on the same platform or moving to a comparable one. This is the right project when the site's bones are wrong: services buried three clicks deep, no individual service pages, copy written in 2018, no clear path from "visitor" to "phone call."
- What it fixes: structure, messaging, conversion paths, and (if done right) the foundation for search rankings.
- Fair price range: $2,000 to $6,000 from a freelancer or productized shop for a typical local business; $8,000 to $15,000 and up from an agency.
- The biggest cost driver: content. Rewriting 10 pages well is most of the labor. If a quote for a "full redesign" is suspiciously cheap, the usual reason is that your old copy is getting pasted into a new template, which is a refresh wearing a full redesign's price tag.
3. The rebuild: roughly $2,000 to $20,000+
Start over. New platform, new design, new content, old site retired. This sounds like the expensive option, and from an agency it can be. But here's the part of the industry nobody says out loud: for most small business sites, a clean rebuild is often cheaper than a careful redesign.
Why? Because redesigning inside an old site means working around its history. Old plugins, old page builders, a decade of accumulated widgets, a WordPress install with 34 plugins of unknown purpose. Untangling that is slow, and slow is expensive. Building fresh on a modern stack skips the archaeology. It's the same reason a contractor will sometimes tell you it's cheaper to take a wall to the studs than to patch around forty years of previous repairs. If you run a trade business, you already know this instinct. It applies to your website too.
This is the model we use at Omnyra: we rebuild rather than renovate, live on a call with you, because starting clean is faster and the result is faster too. Our pricing runs $500 (Minimal) to $2,000 plus $200 per month (Standard) to $3,500 plus $400 per month (Max), which means a full rebuild from us frequently costs less than other shops quote for a partial redesign. One transparent data point; weigh it against your other quotes.
The hidden line item: migration
Whatever quote you get, migration is where surprise costs live. Ask specifically about each of these:
- Content migration. Moving your pages, posts, and images to the new site. For a 10-page site, trivial. For a site with 150 blog posts, real work. Expect $250 to $2,000 depending on volume, or confirm it's included.
- URL redirects. If page addresses change and nobody sets up redirects, every link to your old pages (from Google, from other sites, from your own Google Business Profile) hits a dead end. This is the single most common way a redesign quietly destroys rankings. Redirect mapping should be explicitly in the quote. Google's documentation on site moves and redirects is clear that this is on you (or your builder) to handle.
- Domain and email. Your domain should already be in an account you control; a redesign is the moment you find out whether it is. And if your email runs through your old hosting (it often does), moving hosts without a plan takes your email down with it. Ask: "Does anything about this project touch my email?"
- Forms, tracking, and integrations. Contact form notifications, analytics, call tracking, booking widgets, anything wired to your CRM or field software. Each needs to be reconnected and tested on the new site. Make the launch checklist part of the contract.
None of these are expensive individually. All of them are expensive when discovered after launch.
Redesign vs rebuild: a quick decision guide
Choose the refresh if all of these are true: the site already produces leads, it ranks for searches you care about, the structure is sound, and it just looks dated.
Choose the full redesign if: the platform is fine and modern, but the structure and content are wrong. You have pages worth keeping and rankings worth protecting, and the redirect work to preserve them is part of the plan.
Choose the rebuild if any of these are true:
- The site has never produced meaningful leads. There's nothing to protect, so protectiveness is false economy.
- It's slow and the platform is the reason. Run it through PageSpeed Insights; if it scores poorly on mobile and it's an aging page-builder site, a redesign inside that platform inherits the problem.
- Nobody knows how it works. If updating the homepage requires a séance with a developer who left in 2021, you don't own a website, you own a liability.
- A rebuild quote comes in at or below the redesign quotes. This happens more often than you'd think, for the reasons above.
One honest caveat in the other direction: if your site has years of ranking pages and steady organic leads, a rebuild done carelessly can torch that overnight. The redirect mapping and content preservation matter more than the design. Don't let anyone, including us, rebuild a ranking site without a written plan for what happens to every page that currently gets traffic.
How to make quotes comparable
The reason redesign quotes are all over the map is that each vendor silently quotes a different project. Force the quotes onto the same axes and the real differences appear. Send every bidder the same five questions:
- Which pages are being redesigned, restructured, or rewritten? Get the page list in writing. "The website" is not a scope.
- Who writes the copy, and how many rounds of revision are included? This is where cheap quotes hide their cheapness.
- What's the redirect plan? If the answer involves any hesitation, the bidder either hasn't thought about your rankings or assumes you won't ask.
- What happens to my forms, tracking, and integrations at launch? You want a checklist, not reassurance.
- What do I own at the end, and what does it cost to leave? Domain, content, design files, hosting account. The right answer is "everything, nothing."
A $4,000 quote that answers all five crisply is usually a better buy than a $2,500 quote that answers none of them, because the gaps in the cheap quote become change orders later. The total cost of a redesign is the quote plus everything that wasn't in it.
What this looked like for one of our clients
Ramar Transportation, a trucking company here in North Carolina, had been in business for more than 20 years. In all that time, their website had never produced a single lead. That's not a redesign situation; there was nothing to preserve. We rebuilt it clean, and they got their first-ever website lead the day after launch.
Twenty years, zero leads, then one in 24 hours. The lesson isn't that we're magicians. It's that a site built to convert and a site that merely exists are different products, and no refresh budget turns one into the other. The same pattern holds across our portfolio in trucking, HVAC, and landscaping: the structure does the work, not the paint.
If you'd rather just watch it get rebuilt
We're a veteran-owned shop in Wilmington, NC, and we've built 1,500+ small business sites in the last 90 days using a done-with-you model: we build your site live on a call while you talk. First draft within 24 hours. Live in 7 days, guaranteed, redirects and migration included in the plan.
- Minimal: $500
- Standard: $2,000 plus $200 per month with ongoing SEO and AI-search optimization
- Max: $3,500 plus $400 per month with a 24/7 AI receptionist
- Super Max: from $6,000 for custom back office builds
Pay-in-4 and Klarna financing available. See /pricing for everything, or book a call and bring your old site. We'll tell you honestly whether it needs a refresh, a redesign, or a fresh start.