Published market ranges for a website redesign, the six factors that move the number, the migration cost nobody quotes, and where AI actually makes a redesign cheaper.
Published agency pricing guides put website redesign cost at roughly $3,000 to $75,000 for a small-business marketing site. The split behind that range: $5,000 to $75,000 from an agency, $3,000 to $10,000 from a freelancer, and $800 to $5,000 for a DIY or in-house rebuild. On the ecommerce side, Shopify’s 2026 cost guide puts custom store design and development at $2,000 to $20,000 or more, plus $5 to $300 a month in platform fees. Those are industry-typical figures pulled from other people’s published price lists. They are not PageLyft prices. We scope a site before we quote it.
A range that wide is not much help on its own, so the rest of this guide explains what sits inside it. The short version: two projects can both be called a redesign and differ by 20x in price, because one is a five-page brochure site with a new coat of paint and the other is a 400-URL migration with a product catalog, a CRM integration, a member login, and rankings that have to survive the switch.
What a website redesign actually includes
Most quotes bundle work that never shows up in the mockups. When we scope a redesign, the line items usually look like this:
- Discovery and inventory. A crawl of every existing URL, plus a look at which pages actually earn traffic, leads, or revenue today.
- Information architecture. Deciding which pages survive and which get cut or folded into something else. This is where most of the traffic risk lives.
- Design. Page templates rather than pages. A 60-page site usually runs on 8 to 12 templates.
- Build. Turning templates into a working site with a CMS your team can edit without filing a ticket.
- Content migration. Moving copy, images, metadata, and structured data into the new system, cleaning it as it goes.
- Redirect mapping. Every old URL pointed at its new home, one by one, and tested before launch.
- Analytics and tracking migration. Goals, events, conversion tracking, and any ad platform pixels carried over so reporting stays continuous.
- Launch and post-launch QA. Crawl errors, broken links, index coverage, and Core Web Vitals verified after the switch.
If a quote covers only design and build, the migration work has been moved onto your team. That is a real cost sitting outside the invoice.
Website redesign cost by site type
Here are the published market ranges, organized by who does the work and what kind of site it is. Sources are the two guides linked above.
| Site or provider type | Typical published range | What that usually buys |
|---|---|---|
| DIY or in-house marketing site | $800 to $5,000 per site | Builder subscription, a paid theme, and your team’s hours |
| Freelance marketing-site redesign | $3,000 to $10,000 per site | Design and build for a small page count, migration often excluded |
| Agency marketing-site redesign | $5,000 to $75,000 per site | Strategy, custom design, migration, redirects, and QA |
| Ecommerce store on a prebuilt theme | $0 to $200 for the theme, $5 to $300 a month for the platform | Template storefront, your own product data entry |
| Custom ecommerce design and development | $2,000 to $20,000 or more | Custom storefront, catalog migration, checkout and app integrations |
Two notes on reading this table. First, the low end of every row assumes someone on your side does the unglamorous work: writing copy, entering product data, checking redirects, and chasing down the old site’s assets. Second, the ecommerce numbers cover the storefront only. Payment processing runs 1% to 3% plus a flat fee per transaction, which is an ongoing cost rather than a project cost.
The six factors that move the number
1. Page and template count
Price tracks templates more closely than pages. Ten product pages that share one layout cost far less than four pages that each need their own design. When you ask for a quote, count distinct layouts, then count total URLs separately. A site with 12 templates and 300 URLs is a design job of moderate size sitting on top of a large migration.
2. Migration complexity
This is the factor most owners underestimate. Moving 40 pages of clean copy out of a tidy CMS is a day of work. Pulling 300 pages out of a 9-year-old WordPress install with 30 plugins, inline styles baked into every paragraph, and ranking PDFs nobody has touched since 2019 is a project of its own. Four questions decide the number here: how many URLs you have, how consistent the content structure is, how much cleanup it needs before it moves, and how many of those URLs currently rank.
3. Ecommerce
A catalog turns a redesign into a data project. Products, variants, inventory sync, tax and shipping rules, discount logic, and the apps bolted onto checkout all have to land intact. Shopify’s guide puts custom development at $2,000 to $20,000 or more for that reason. If your store has 5,000 SKUs and a custom checkout flow, you are at the top of that range or above it.
4. Custom features and integrations
Every system the site talks to adds scope: a CRM, a booking tool, a member portal, a quoting calculator, a location finder pulling from a database. Each one needs to be rebuilt or reconnected, then tested. A marketing site with zero integrations and a marketing site with six are different projects wearing the same name.
5. Content production
Reusing existing copy is cheap. Writing new copy is not. Most redesign quotes include a fixed number of pages of copywriting, and anything past that is a change order. Decide up front which pages get rewritten, which get edited, and which move as-is. Photography and video sit in the same bucket, and they are often the reason a launch date slips.
6. How fast you need it live
Compressed timelines cost more everywhere in this industry, because they mean more people working in parallel and more overtime. If you have a hard date tied to a campaign or a trade show, say so in the first conversation. That changes how the project gets staffed, which then changes the quote.
The hidden cost nobody prices in
The largest cost in a redesign is usually the traffic you lose when the migration is handled badly, and it never shows up on the quote.
Here is how it happens, using round numbers for illustration. The new site launches with cleaner URLs. Nobody built a full redirect map, so 180 old URLs return 404s. Google drops them from the index over the next few weeks. Pages that were sending 400 visits and 12 leads a month stop sending anything. Six months later you are paying someone to rebuild rankings you already owned, on top of what the redesign itself cost.
Run the math on your own site before you shop for quotes. Take the leads your site produces in a month, multiply by your close rate and average deal value, then ask what a 40% traffic drop for six months costs you. For most local businesses that number is larger than the entire redesign budget. That is why we treat the URL inventory and redirect map as step one of a website redesign, before a single page is designed.
The same logic applies to tracking. If your analytics and conversion events do not carry across, you lose the ability to prove whether the redesign worked. Losing six months of comparable data is a cost, even though it never appears on a line item.
Website redesign AI: where it cuts cost and where it does not
Search volume for “website redesign ai” has climbed fast, and the pitch behind it is usually vague. Here is the concrete version, based on how we build.
AI takes real cost out of the mechanical middle of a redesign:
- Content migration mapping. Matching hundreds of old URLs to new destinations, flagging orphans, and drafting the redirect table. Humans review it, and the first pass is generated in minutes.
- Content cleanup. Stripping legacy markup, normalizing headings, and pulling metadata out of messy exports.
- First-draft copy and metadata. Title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and schema markup across hundreds of pages, then edited by a person.
- Component code. Building out the repetitive parts of a template system once the design decisions are made.
- QA sweeps. Crawling the staging site for broken links, missing alt text, heading order problems, and redirect chains.
Those are the tasks that used to eat weeks of billable hours on a large migration. Compressing them is why an AI-leveraged studio can deliver in weeks what a traditional agency schedules in months, and why the same scope costs less to produce.
What AI does not decide:
- Which pages to kill. That comes from your revenue data and your knowledge of the sales conversation.
- The URL strategy. Changing a URL structure is a bet with real downside. A person signs off on it.
- What the business actually sells. Positioning comes out of talking to you and your customers.
- Brand and design judgment. Generated layouts converge on the same generic patterns. Standing out is still a human call.
- Final redirect approval. Every high-value URL gets checked by a person before launch.
If a shop tells you AI does the whole redesign, they are describing a template with a new logo. If they tell you AI changes nothing, they are billing you for hours a machine can do. The useful middle is what we describe in what an AI SEO agency actually does.
DIY builder versus agency
The honest breakdown, given the ranges above.
A builder makes sense when your site is under about 10 pages, you have little or no organic traffic to protect, you are pre-revenue or testing an offer, and someone on your team genuinely has the hours. At $800 to $5,000 all-in, it is the cheapest path to something live.
A builder gets expensive when the site starts carrying real revenue. The costs show up as slow load times, thin templates that every competitor also uses, plugin fees that stack up monthly, and the hours your team spends fighting the editor instead of selling. None of that lands on an invoice, which is why it gets missed.
An agency makes sense when you have rankings to protect, more than a handful of templates, an integration or two, or a team that needs to publish without a developer. The migration work alone justifies it once your site is producing leads you can count. If your project is closer to a first build than a rebuild, our web design page covers that path.
One more cost to plan for either way: what happens after launch. A WordPress site bills you monthly to patch plugins, and a site nobody updates loses ground to competitors who publish. We put that monthly budget into content and conversion work instead, which is what our website maintenance plans cover.
How PageLyft scopes a quote
We do not publish a price list, because the number depends on things we can only see by looking at your current site. The scoping process is short and specific:
- Crawl the current site. A full URL inventory next to your current rankings, so we can see which pages produce traffic or leads today.
- Count templates, not pages. This sets the design and build effort.
- List integrations and data. CRM, booking, catalog, anything the new site has to talk to.
- Decide content treatment. Which pages move as-is, which get edited, which get rewritten.
- Size the migration. How complex the redirects are, plus what it takes to carry structured data and tracking across intact.
- Send a fixed scope and estimate. In writing, before any work starts, with the deliverables named.
Pricing is scoped to the work rather than billed by the hour. A focused redesign of a small marketing site sits at the lower end of what you saw above. A large site with hundreds of URLs, a heavy migration, custom functionality, and a catalog sits well above it. You get the real number after step six, and it does not move unless the scope does.
Get a number for your site
Book a 20-minute call and we will look at your current site together. You will leave with a page count, the migration risks we can see, a rough sense of scope, and a clear next step, whether or not you work with us.