What a website redesign costs.

Straight answer first: a redesign usually costs about the same as building a site from scratch, and occasionally more. That surprises people, because it sounds like the work is half done already.

It is not. The design and the build are only part of the job, and a redesign adds work a fresh build never has: understanding what is already there, keeping the parts that earn their keep, and moving everything across without breaking what already works.

The ranges

General market figures for a small business in the GTA, to calibrate expectations rather than as a quote:

• Template swap on an existing platform: roughly $500 to $1,500. New look, same structure, same content. Fast, and fine if the bones are sound.
• Proper redesign by a freelancer or specialist: roughly $1,500 to $5,000. New design, rewritten pages, migration handled properly. This is where most local businesses land.
• Agency redesign: $8,000 to $30,000 and up. Buys polish and process. Also buys project managers and meetings a local trade does not need.

The same warning applies as with what a website should cost: price and quality are not the same line. Paying more does not reliably buy you more work.

Why it can cost more than starting fresh

Three things, and they are all invisible in the finished result, which is why they get left out of cheap quotes:

• Working out what is already there. Somebody has to go through the existing site page by page, find what ranks, what gets traffic, and what nobody has looked at since 2019. On a fresh build there is nothing to inventory.
• Moving it without breaking it. Addresses mapped, redirects written and tested, page titles carried across. Skip this and you get the traffic drop that people blame on the redesign itself.
• Working around what exists. Old content in a format nobody uses any more, a booking tool that has to keep working, a domain in someone else's account. Constraints cost time.

What should be included

At this price, all of this should be in the number rather than added afterwards:

• A list of every current page and what happens to it.
• Redirects from every old address, set up and tested.
• Page titles and descriptions carried over or improved, not regenerated blindly.
• Your business details markup rebuilt so search results keep showing your address and hours.
• A new sitemap submitted to Google.
• The site actually visible to search engines on launch day.
• The files and the login handed to you, in your name. If that is not obvious in the quote, read who owns your website before you sign.

Quotes worth walking away from

• No mention of redirects or migration. Either they do not know, or they are not doing it. Both cost you later.
• Monthly-only with nothing owned. A low monthly that never ends and leaves you with nothing if you stop is a rental, not a redesign.
• A number given before anyone looked at the current site. They cannot know the migration work without looking, so either the price moves later or the work does not happen.
• Redesign as an upsell after a cold call. The people who ring you about your dated website are selling, not diagnosing.

The cheapest redesign is the one you do not need. Before spending anything, work out whether yours actually needs doing, because a rewrite and better photos will fix more sites than a rebuild will.