What a website redesign actually costs in 2026.

Why does every guide give a different number?

Search for what a redesign costs and the first page will tell you $3,000 to $15,000, or $10,000 to $25,000, or $15,000 to $80,000, depending on which article you open. All of them describe a small business site. None of them explain why they disagree, and almost none say where their numbers came from.

Two things are going on. The first is who writes these guides. Every one of the top five results for this question is published by an agency that sells redesigns, which is not a crime, but it does mean each range is really a description of that agency’s own price list.

The second is that the most repeated figure turns out to be circular. A range of $15,000 to $80,000 is widely attributed to “a HubSpot study”. HubSpot’s own article on redesign costs does not contain that range: it says agencies charge “$15,000-30,000+”, and gives no methodology. HubSpot’s separate roundup of redesign statistics cites a 2022 agency estimate of $3,000 to $65,000, which in turn gives no methodology either. The numbers travel from one agency blog to the next, picking up authority on the way, and none of them rest on data.

So we went and got some.

What 87 agencies say they will accept

Clutch, the largest directory of web design agencies, asks every listed firm for its minimum project size and its average hourly rate. We recorded both for the 50 agencies on the first page of Clutch’s US web design ranking, which is what anybody searching sees first, and for 37 more from the lists for five mid-size cities: Columbus, Charlotte, Kansas City, Tampa and Salt Lake City.

Our own sample of Clutch listings, 87 agencies after removing duplicates. A minimum project size is a floor the agency sets for itself, not a quote. The national list skews toward larger, well reviewed firms, which is exactly the list a searcher is shown.

That is the whole disagreement explained. There are two markets selling what sounds like the same thing. In one, a $5,000 small business redesign is below the minimum two thirds of the time, so the guides written from that market quote five figures. In the other, most agencies will take it, so the guides written from there quote four. Neither is lying. They are describing different shops.

What do providers who publish prices actually charge?

Directory minimums tell you where agencies start. To see what a finished small business site actually costs, we went to the providers who put a price on their own website, and checked every figure against the page itself. That mattered: two of the prices shown in search results did not match what the provider’s page actually said, and we used the page.

Our own sample: 24 packages from 13 providers, of which 14 are 5 to 8 page sites. Figures as published on each provider’s pricing page. We report aggregates rather than naming individual providers.

There is a catch in this data, and it cuts the opposite way to the directory numbers. The providers who publish prices are mostly at the budget end. Agencies with $25,000 minimums rarely put a number on their site, because the number would do their sales process no favours. So the published median of $2,499 is a fair price for what those providers sell, and it is not the going rate for a custom site from an established agency.

Read the two data sets together and a clear picture comes out. A small business site from a provider who works at this size costs around $2,000 to $5,000, or about $150 to $200 a month. The same job from an agency built for larger clients costs $10,000 and up, if they will take it at all.

What the published price actually includes

The headline number is only half of a published price. What sits inside it matters as much, and the two models bundle very differently.

Our own sample, as published on each provider’s pricing page, 30 September 2026.

No one-off package in the sample covered hosting beyond the first year, and only one included any edits after launch. That is not a trick. A one-off price is honestly a price for the build. But it means the one-off figure and the monthly figure are not the same kind of number, and comparing $2,499 with $169 a month directly is comparing a car with a lease that includes the servicing.

What does each price actually buy?

The fairest way to read a website quote is to turn it back into time. Most agencies charge $100 to $150 an hour: 89% of the 87 in our sample were at $100 or more. Divide the quote by the rate and you get the number of hours somebody can spend on your site before the job loses money.

None of those rows is a rip off. A $2,500 site built in twenty hours on a good template can be exactly right for a five page service business, and a $25,000 site can be money wasted if what you needed was five pages. The point of the table is to stop you comparing a twenty hour job with a two hundred hour job as though they were the same product at different prices.

Who should build it?

Most of the price difference between quotes is really a difference between kinds of supplier. Each one is the right answer for somebody, and each one comes with a specific risk worth knowing before you sign.

Builder plan prices: Wix from $17.77 to $39.77 a month on annual billing, checked 1 October 2026. Freelancer range from GruffyGoat. The other rows are from our own two samples above.

Package prices from overseas providers go lower still. The cheapest five to eight page site in our sample was $280. That is a real product and some businesses are well served by it, but at that price it is a template with your text pasted in, and it is worth knowing that before comparing it with a quote from somebody who will sit in a room with you.

When is a redesign worth it at all?

A surprising number of redesigns are bought for the wrong reason. The site is three years old, a competitor launched a new one, or traffic dropped and a redesign felt like doing something. Here is the test we would use.

The pattern in the right hand column is that each one describes a problem a new website does not solve. Falling traffic in particular is usually happening off your site, which is covered in the section on whether a redesign fixes falling enquiries below.

Do you need a refresh, a redesign or a rebuild?

Most of the spread in quotes comes from people asking for different things with the same word. Work out which of these three you actually need before you ask anyone for a price.

A lot of businesses are sold a rebuild when a refresh would do, because a rebuild is the bigger invoice. The reverse happens too: a new coat of paint on a site that loads in nine seconds and cannot be edited without phoning somebody. Ask what problem each option actually solves, and whether you can see that problem on your current site today.

Which platform should the new site be on?

The platform underneath a site decides three things that outlast the design: what it costs every month, how easily you can edit it, and whether you can ever take it somewhere else. It is worth deciding on purpose rather than accepting whatever the supplier happens to use.

Wix from the official plans page, checked 1 October 2026. Squarespace from Website Builder Expert, Webflow from Digidop after its May 2026 plan changes. WordPress hosting from Codeable. Platform prices change often, so check before you commit.

There is no wrong answer in that table, only trade-offs. A builder is cheapest to run and easiest to edit, and hardest to leave. WordPress is the most portable and the most work to look after. The only genuinely risky row is the last one, and only if nobody asks the question in advance.

What should a redesign quote include?

Two quotes for the same site can differ by thousands of dollars simply because one of them leaves things out. These are the lines to look for, and the ones most often missing.

The ownership questions in the last three rows are covered properly in who owns your website.

Does a redesign need to be accessible?

It is the line most small business quotes leave out, and in the US it has become a real cost of owning a website. An accessible site is one that works for people using screen readers, keyboards instead of a mouse, or larger text, and the Americans with Disabilities Act is increasingly applied to websites in court.

From UsableNet’s analysis of 2025 filings, ADA web lawsuit trends for 2026.

Two things follow for a redesign. First, the risk falls mostly on shops and restaurants, so a five page service business is not in the same position as an online store, and nobody should sell you accessibility work through fear. Second, the cheap fix does not work. The same report found that accessibility overlay widgets, the one line scripts sold as a quick solution, “do not materially reduce legal risk”. What courts look for is a site built properly in the first place.

The good news is that building it properly costs very little when it happens during a redesign rather than after one. Sensible colour contrast, real text instead of text inside images, labelled form fields, headings in order, and a site that works with a keyboard are all things a competent build includes by default. Ask whether the quote includes an accessibility check against WCAG, the recognised standard, and ask what they check it with.

What does a redesign cost over three years?

The build is a one-off. Everything that keeps the site secure, current and actually producing enquiries is monthly, and none of it appears on the quote you are comparing. Here are two honest three year totals built from published market rates.

Hosting and care plan rates from Codeable and FatLab. Content, listings and outreach are not included, and those are the lines that decide whether the site produces work. The detail is in what website maintenance costs.

The build is only a third of the three year cost, even before anybody writes a single new page or chases a single listing. Everything that makes a site produce work, rather than merely exist, sits on top of that total. You can buy all of it separately, and most businesses do, from four or five different suppliers.

Price the monthly side up yourself →

Should you pay monthly or pay once?

Three of the providers in our sample sell the same small site both ways, which gives a rare like for like comparison rather than a sales argument.

Our own sample of published prices. Providers are anonymised. Totals exclude any content or marketing work.

So the monthly route is not automatically the expensive one, and the one-off route is not automatically the owned one. What decides it is the paperwork, and the paperwork is where our sample was weakest:

• Only 3 of the 9 monthly providers say what you own if you leave. The other six do not mention it on their pricing page at all.
• One keeps ownership of the site outright, switches it off when you cancel, and charges $2,000 to leave inside the first year.
• 3 of the 9 have a twelve month minimum. The rest say you can cancel any time.

Whichever you choose, the question to get answered in writing is the same: what happens to the site on the day you stop paying. The full comparison is in website subscription vs paying once, and the floor costs nobody can avoid are in do you have to pay monthly for a website.

How do you redesign without losing your Google rankings?

This is the most expensive thing that goes wrong in a redesign, and it barely appears in the guides that rank for this question. A new site launches, the old page addresses stop working, and years of search history pointing at those addresses goes nowhere. Enquiries from Google fall, and it takes weeks to notice why.

Google publishes its own guidance for moving a site with changed addresses. The short version: use permanent redirects, map every old address to its new one, and keep the redirects in place “generally at least 1 year”. It also warns that “you may experience ranking fluctuations while Google recrawls and reindexes your site”, so a short dip after launch is normal and not a sign that something is broken.

From Google Search Central, site moves with URL changes.

On a ten page site this is an afternoon’s work. On a site with eight years of blog posts it can be a week, which is exactly why it gets left out of cheaper quotes. Ask every supplier how they handle redirects. The answer tells you whether they have done a redesign before or only ever built new sites.

What should happen in the first 90 days after launch?

A redesign is not finished on launch day. The weeks afterwards are when the redirect gaps show up, when the enquiry form turns out to email the wrong address, and when you find out whether the new site is actually doing better than the old one. Most quotes stop at launch, so make sure somebody owns this part.

The last row is the one that matters. A redesign that looks better and produces the same number of enquiries has changed the look of the business, not the results. It is worth knowing which of those you paid for.

How do you compare two quotes?

Put every quote through the same ten questions. Once they all answer them, quotes that looked impossible to compare line up side by side.

What a good and a bad answer sound like is in questions to ask a web designer, and what drives the timeline is in how long it takes to build a website.

What are the warning signs in a website proposal?

Most suppliers are honest and most proposals are fine. These are the specific lines that should make you stop and ask a follow up question before signing.

• The domain will be registered by the supplier. The single hardest thing to unwind later. It should be in your name, in your own account, from day one.
• “Unlimited revisions.” It sounds generous and usually means nobody has defined what one revision is, which means there is no launch date either.
• No line for redirects, on a site that already gets visits from Google.
• Copy “to be supplied by client” in the small print, when nobody mentioned it on the call.
• A timeline that starts on signature rather than when your content arrives, or no timeline at all.
• A ranking guarantee. Google’s own guidance is blunt: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.” Anyone promising page one is telling you something they cannot control.
• A platform only they can host, with nothing written about what happens if you leave.
• A price before anybody asked what you need. A quote given before a single question about your pages, customers or goals is a price list, not a proposal.

Ranking guarantee quote from Google Search Central, do you need an SEO.

A worked example: three quotes for the same site

To show how the ten questions work in practice, here is a seven page site for a plumbing firm, quoted three ways. The figures are illustrative, built from the ranges on this page. They are not real quotes from real suppliers.

Illustrative. Three year totals add the build, any bought-in copy, and 36 months of running costs.

Run through the ten questions and the ranking changes. The national agency is the most complete quote and roughly three times the cost of the next one, which is hard to justify for seven pages unless the business needs the strategy work that comes with it. The local agency is the best value on paper, but the missing redirect line is the most expensive gap on the whole table if the old site gets search traffic, and the copy is an extra $1,500 nobody quoted. The monthly provider is cheapest over three years and will not say what you own, which makes it a bet until that answer is in writing.

None of the three is a bad quote. Each one has a single question that decides whether it is a good one, and the exercise is about finding that question before you sign rather than after.