What a website redesign should cost in 2026

Every few weeks someone sends us three quotes for the same redesign and asks which one is right. The lowest is usually around £4,000 and the highest can be over £90,000. Both can be honest. They are pricing different amounts of work, and most quotes do a poor job of saying which work is included.

This is how we think about cost in 2026, using our own published prices as the reference point. They are not the only fair prices, but they are real ones, and they will help you read any quote more clearly.

Where the money goes

A redesign is not mostly design. On a typical twelve-week business site, the time splits roughly like this:

• Discovery and planning, about 15 per cent. Workshops, an analytics review, a content audit and a written brief.
• Design, about 30 per cent. Art direction, every page and state, and a clickable prototype.
• Build, about 35 per cent. Templates, CMS, content model, image pipeline and testing on real devices.
• Launch and handover, about 20 per cent. Redirects, tracking, content migration, training and the first month of fixes.

The cheap quotes tend to cut the first and last of those. That feels harmless until launch week, when nobody has mapped the old URLs and your best-ranking pages start returning errors.

Three honest price bands

Up to £10,000. A template or lightly customised theme, set up by a freelancer or a small team. This is the right answer for a new business that needs to be online and credible quickly. Expect limited design input, a standard CMS set-up and little planning. Do not expect it to hold your rankings through a migration.

£18,000 to £35,000. A custom-designed marketing site of up to around eight page templates, built on Framer, Webflow or WordPress, with a CMS your team can run. This is where our business websites start, at £18,000 over six to eight weeks. The money pays for real art direction, a content model built around how your team publishes, and a migration plan.

£32,000 to £60,000 and beyond. Stores, multi-language sites, configurators, integrations with booking engines or stock systems, and headless builds on Next.js. Our e-commerce stores start at £32,000 and custom builds at £60,000. Above that line, a paid discovery phase is the only responsible way to price.

What pushes the price up

Page count matters less than people expect. Templates matter more. A site with forty service pages built from one well-designed template costs less than a site with eight pages that all behave differently. The things that genuinely move the number are:

• Content migration, especially from an old CMS with years of inconsistent posts.
• Integrations: booking engines, CRMs, inventory and single sign-on.
• Multiple languages or markets, each with its own pricing or legal copy.
• Custom interactive pieces, such as configurators, calculators or maps.
• How many people need to approve each stage.

That last one is the cost nobody quotes for. A project with one decision-maker moves twice as fast as one with a committee of six, and time is the only thing a studio really sells.

What quietly brings it down

The cheapest redesign is the one with a clear brief. When a client arrives with their goals agreed internally, their content owner named and their brand assets in one folder, we can usually take a week or two out of the plan. That is a saving of several thousand pounds before anyone has opened Figma.

Choosing a platform your team already knows helps too. If your marketing team lives in Webflow, rebuilding in Webflow avoids retraining and a second learning curve after launch.

Budget for the year after launch

A website is not finished at launch. Software needs updating, pages need adding, and the first three months of real traffic always reveal something worth changing. We suggest setting aside 10 to 15 per cent of the build cost each year for care and improvements. Our care plans start at £450 a month for updates, monitoring and two hours of changes, and most clients move to a larger plan once they see what small, steady changes do for conversion.

Questions to ask every studio

Before you compare numbers, ask each studio the same five questions. The answers tell you more than the totals do.

1. What exactly is included in discovery, and what do we receive at the end of it?
2. How will you protect our search rankings during the move?
3. How many rounds of design review are included, and what happens after that?
4. Who will build the site, and will we meet them before we sign?
5. What does the first year after launch realistically cost?

A good studio answers all five in writing, without hedging. We put ours in every proposal, alongside a fixed price. If you would like one for your own project, a 30-minute call is enough for us to tell you which band you are in and why.