Website Redesign Cost: What You Will Actually Pay
Three very different jobs get called a redesign, and they are priced ten to one apart. Here are the real Australian bands, the line items that never make it onto the quote, and the times we tell people not to spend the money at all.
Most Australian small business redesigns land between $3,000 and $15,000 excluding GST. A visual refresh on your existing build runs $1,500 to $5,000. A proper restructure and rebuild on the same platform is $6,000 to $15,000. Moving to a different platform entirely starts near $12,000 and climbs from there. The gap is scope, not talent.
What are the three types of website redesign?
There are three, and they share almost nothing except the word. A refresh changes how the site looks. A rebuild changes how the site is put together. A replatform changes what the site runs on. A $2,000 quote and a $20,000 quote can both be honest answers to one enquiry, because the two agencies heard different jobs.
A refresh keeps your existing pages, URLs and templates. New colours, new fonts, new hero images, tidier buttons, maybe a rewritten home page. Fast, cheap, and the right answer more often than agencies admit. It will not fix a site that is slow, badly structured, or missing the pages people actually search for.
A rebuild throws away the templates and starts again on the same content management system. New page structure, new navigation, new service pages, content rewritten rather than copied across. This is the band most businesses are really shopping for when they say the site feels dated, and where the money goes furthest, because you are changing the things that affect enquiries.
A replatform moves you off one system and onto another: Wix or Squarespace to WordPress, or an abandoned custom build to something maintained. Everything gets rebuilt because nothing carries over cleanly. Expect the top of the range if you have hundreds of pages, a product catalogue, or integrations hanging off the site.
| Type of redesign | What actually changes | Typical price (ex GST) | Timeframe |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh | Colours, fonts, imagery, button and section styling, home page copy. Structure, URLs and platform stay put. | $1,500 to $5,000 | 1 to 3 weeks |
| Restructure and rebuild (same platform) | New sitemap, new templates, new navigation, rewritten service pages, new forms, performance work. | $6,000 to $15,000 | 5 to 10 weeks |
| Full replatform | Everything above, plus migrating off the old system, rebuilding integrations, and rebuilding the content model from scratch. | $12,000 to $40,000+ | 8 to 16 weeks |
Why is a rebuild often cheaper than repairing an old site?
Because repair work cannot be scoped accurately and rebuilds can. When a developer opens a site patched by four different people over eight years, the first two days are archaeology, not building. Nobody enjoys paying for archaeology.
Old builds accumulate a particular kind of mess: two page builders installed at once, custom CSS pasted into the theme options to force something into place, a plugin doing one job on one page that breaks everything if you deactivate it, a child theme with edits nobody documented. Every fix has to be tested against all of that. We have quoted $4,500 to repair a site and $6,500 to rebuild it, and recommended the rebuild, because the repair leaves you with the same brittle thing and the same conversation in twelve months.
The rough line we use: if the site is more than six years old, or built on a page builder that is no longer actively developed, get a rebuild price before you approve any repair over about $2,500. Under six years and reasonably clean, repair usually wins. Our website design and rebuild service quotes both ways for exactly this reason, so you can see the two numbers side by side rather than taking our word for it.
What costs are missing from most redesign quotes?
The design and build line is usually accurate. It is everything around it that gets underquoted, either because nobody asked enough questions or because a low headline number wins the job and the extras get invoiced later.
Content migration is the big one. Moving 40 pages of text, images, PDFs and internal links across by hand takes real hours, and automated imports from Wix or Squarespace produce something you then have to clean up anyway. Redirect mapping is the second. Every changed URL needs a permanent redirect to its closest replacement, and on an 80 page site that is a spreadsheet somebody builds and checks line by line.
Then the smaller ones that add up fast. Forms rarely survive a rebuild: enquiry forms, bookings, quote calculators and anything wired into a CRM all get rebuilt and retested. Images shot for a 2018 layout are the wrong crop and usually four times bigger than they need to be. And somebody has to show your admin staff where the news page moved to, or they will stop updating it.
| Hidden line item | Why it exists | Typical add-on (ex GST) |
|---|---|---|
| Content migration | Moving and reformatting existing pages, PDFs and internal links into the new templates | $600 to $3,000 |
| Redirect mapping | Old URL to new URL for every changed page, implemented and tested | $400 to $1,500 |
| Forms and integrations | Rebuilding enquiry forms, bookings, payment and CRM connections | $350 to $2,500 |
| Image reoptimisation | Recropping, compressing and serving modern formats for the new layouts | $250 to $900 |
| Staff retraining | Walkthrough and short recorded guides so your team can edit without ringing us | $300 to $1,200 |
| Plugin and theme licences | Ongoing annual cost of whatever the new build depends on | $150 to $600 per year |
On a mid sized rebuild those extras add $2,000 to $6,000. Ask for them itemised. If an agency will not itemise them, that is a scoping problem, and it will surface as a variation halfway through the build.
Before you sign anything: ask for the redirect map to be a named deliverable with a due date before launch. It is the cheapest insurance on the whole project, and the thing most often skipped because it is boring and invisible when done properly.
Will a redesign hurt your Google rankings?
It can, and the damage is almost always self inflicted. Sites that change URLs without redirects, drop content because it looked untidy, or lose their heading structure to a prettier layout routinely see organic traffic fall 20 to 40 per cent in the weeks after launch. Sites that plan for it dip for two to six weeks, then recover.
What causes the fall is predictable. Pages that were ranking get merged into one page nobody targeted. The 800 word service page becomes a 150 word page with a big photo. Page titles get rewritten by a designer who thought they were only tidying. The blog gets left behind and quietly 404s.
Protecting rankings through a redesign costs $800 to $2,500 excluding GST on a typical small business site. That buys a full crawl and ranking baseline before work starts, a URL to URL redirect map, the old page titles and headings carried across deliberately rather than by accident, and four to eight weeks of monitoring after launch so a problem gets caught in days rather than at the next quarterly report. On a large site with thousands of URLs it costs more, but it is still a rounding error against the traffic.
Be sceptical of anyone promising your rankings will improve after a redesign. Nobody can guarantee search positions, and under Australian consumer law that sort of promise is a problem for the agency making it. A well planned redesign protects what you have and gives you a better platform to improve from. That is the honest version.
When should you keep the website you have?
When it still converts. If the site loads in under three seconds, works properly on a phone, gets found for the searches that matter, and turns visitors into enquiries at a rate you are happy with, being bored of it is not a business reason to spend $12,000.
We talk people out of redesigns fairly often. The usual pattern is a business owner who has looked at their own home page a thousand times and a competitor’s home page once. Their site is fine. Their problem is elsewhere: no Google Business Profile activity, a phone nobody answers after 4pm, an enquiry form landing in an inbox checked weekly, or no traffic because nothing has ever been done about search.
Signs the money belongs elsewhere:
- Traffic is healthy but enquiries are flat. That is usually a messaging and call to action problem, and a copy pass at $1,500 to $3,000 will outperform a full rebuild.
- Almost nobody is visiting. A prettier site with no audience is still a site with no audience. Fix acquisition first.
- The complaint is that it looks old, but the analytics show visitors going straight to the contact page and calling.
- You changed direction six months ago and the offer is still moving. Redesigning around a strategy you are still testing means paying twice.
The flip side, and the point where we stop arguing: if the site cannot be edited without a developer, is not mobile friendly, or sits on software that no longer gets security updates, replace it. Those are structural problems and tinkering does not fix them.
How do you phase a redesign if cash flow is tight?
Split it into three stages across two or three quarters. It works because the pages that earn the money are a small fraction of the site, and nothing says the whole thing has to launch on one day.
Stage one, roughly $2,500 to $4,500 excluding GST: home page, your top two or three service pages, contact page, and the technical groundwork (new templates, hosting sorted, performance baseline). These are the pages that receive most of your traffic and almost all of your enquiries. Launching them alone often moves the numbers enough to fund stage two.
Stage two, $2,000 to $5,000: remaining service pages, location pages if you serve multiple suburbs, about and team pages, case studies. This is where search visibility gets rebuilt, so it deserves the second slot rather than the last.
Stage three, $1,500 to $4,000: blog migrated properly, integrations finished, image library cleaned up, staff trained, redirects audited one final time. Boring work, and the stage people skip, which is why it belongs in the agreement up front with a date attached.
Two conditions make phasing work. The design system has to be built once at the start, so stages two and three are assembly rather than fresh design. And the old and new pages need to coexist without looking like two different companies, which limits how far apart the stages can sit. Six to nine months is workable. Two years is not. We will scope the numbers behind each stage as part of a staged website build, and you can stop after any stage without penalty.
What should you ask for before approving a redesign quote?
Four things, and they take five minutes. What happens to the existing URLs. Who writes the content, and what if it is late. What the site costs to run annually once live, licences and hosting included. And what the exit looks like if you move elsewhere in three years.
That last one matters more than people expect. A site you cannot take with you is a subscription, not an asset. Ask whether you own the build and whether it can be exported and hosted anywhere. If the answer is vague, price that in. There is more on what drives the running costs across the costs and pricing guides in our Knowledge Centre.
Common questions
How long does a website redesign take from start to launch?
A visual refresh takes one to three weeks. A restructure and rebuild on the same platform is typically five to ten weeks. A full replatform runs eight to sixteen weeks. The build is rarely the delay; content is. Sites where the client supplies copy and photos on time launch roughly a month faster than sites where they do not. Agree a content deadline in writing and treat it as a real one.
Can I keep my existing domain name through a redesign?
Yes, and you should. Your domain carries whatever search authority you have built, plus your email addresses. Changing it means every link pointing at you, every business listing and every printed brochure now points at the wrong place. If you must change domains, redirect the old one permanently and keep paying for it indefinitely. Budget an extra $500 to $1,500 for a domain migration done properly.
Does a redesign quote include writing the content?
Usually not, unless it is listed. Most quotes assume you supply the words. Professional copywriting for a small business site runs $150 to $400 per page, so ten pages is $1,500 to $4,000 excluding GST. It is worth it for your main service pages and rarely worth it for an about page. Ask which pages are included before you compare two quotes, because this line alone can explain most of the difference.
How often should a business redesign its website?
Every five to seven years for a structural rebuild, with smaller refreshes in between. Anything more frequent is usually a symptom of poor planning rather than a genuine need. If you are maintaining the site properly, updating content, watching performance and adjusting pages as the business changes, you will get closer to seven years. Sites nobody touches age much faster and hit the wall around year four.
Will my email stop working when the new site goes live?
It should not, but this is where launches go wrong most often. Email and website hosting are separate services even when they sit on the same account, and pointing your domain at a new server without moving the mail records correctly will bounce email for hours. Ask specifically how mail records are being handled, get it confirmed in writing, and schedule the switch for a weekday morning rather than a Friday evening.
Is a redesign covered by my monthly maintenance plan?
No. Maintenance covers updates, backups, security and small content changes, typically an hour or two a month. A redesign is a project and gets quoted separately. Some agencies credit part of your maintenance fees toward a rebuild after a few years; ask, because it is often available and rarely advertised. What maintenance does do is delay the next redesign, which is where the real saving sits.
Should I redesign before or after investing in SEO?
Before, if the site has structural problems, because search work built on a site you are about to replace gets thrown away. After, if the site is technically sound and just looks tired, because traffic growth will tell you which pages deserve attention in the redesign. The expensive mistake is running both at once with two suppliers who are not talking to each other.
Not sure whether to refresh, rebuild or leave it alone?
Send us your site and we will tell you honestly which of the three you need, with a price for each. We have been building and maintaining sites for Australian businesses since 2004, and we are comfortable telling you to spend nothing.