Website redesign cost: what really makes the budget vary

The cost of a website redesign is the first question every managing director asks, and one no single figure can answer. Two quotes for the same project can be far apart without either supplier being wrong: they are simply not pricing the same thing. Understanding what drives the budget means learning to read what each quote includes — and above all what it leaves out.

The gap rarely lies where people look for it. Design, the most visible line, is almost never the main cause of a price difference. The cause lies in scoping, in content, and in migrating what already exists.

The lines that make up the cost of a website redesign

A complete redesign quote breaks down into around ten lines. Not all of them appear in every quote, and that is precisely the problem.

• Scoping. Workshops, analysis of the existing site, definition of audiences and user journeys. It is the line people are tempted to cut to bring the price down, and the one whose absence costs most later.
• Structure and usability. How pages are organised, the templates, the wireframes.
• Design. The visual interface, applied to the main templates and screen sizes.
• Development and integration. Setting up the content management system, features, forms, and connections to other software.
• Content. Writing, photography, translation, and carrying over existing pages.
• Search optimisation. An inventory of pages that attract traffic, a redirect plan, technical optimisation.
• Testing and launch. Tests, fixes, switchover, and checks after launch.
• Training and documentation. What will allow the business to keep the site alive without depending on the supplier for every change.
• Afterwards. Hosting, maintenance, licences, further development.

A quote that leaves some of these lines out is not necessarily incomplete: it may exclude them on purpose, or assume the business will handle them. But it has to say so. A line that appears nowhere always ends up appearing somewhere — as a change order, as a delay, or as time spent by internal teams.

Why quotes vary so much

Price gaps have identifiable causes. None of them concerns the supplier’s talent, and most come from reading the same need differently.

• The assumed scope. Without a precise description of the need, each supplier imagines its own project. One prices a brochure site, the other a sales tool.
• Responsibility for content. One includes it, the other assumes the business supplies it. It is often the biggest gap, and the least visible.
• The degree of customisation. Adapting an existing theme and designing a bespoke interface do not represent the same work, or the same result.
• The number of iterations. How many rounds of revisions on the mock-ups are included? A low quote may include one and bill the rest.
• Migrating what exists. Moving hundreds of pages, products, customer accounts or a search history is a project in its own right.
• The billing method. A fixed price puts the risk of overrun on the supplier; time-and-materials leaves it with the client. The two figures cannot be compared directly.

It is the same mechanism that explains why most redesigns change nothing: when the need has not been settled upstream, each supplier settles it in its own way, and the quote shows it.

The forgotten costs: content, SEO, hosting, maintenance

Four lines regularly escape the initial budget.

Content

A new site needs text written for it, not copied from the old one. If the quote does not include it, the business will write it alongside everything else it does — and that is the task that most often pushes back the launch.

Search optimisation

Keeping existing rankings requires an inventory of pages and a redirect plan. If it is missing from the quote, the work is either done in a rush after launch or not done at all. The detail of the steps for keeping search rankings through a redesign shows why it cannot be improvised.

Hosting and licences

Hosting, domain name, content management licences, paid extensions, fonts, third-party services: taken one by one, these costs look small. They recur, and they add up over the life of the site.

Maintenance

An unmaintained site deteriorates: security updates, extension compatibility, backups. The maintenance contract deserves close reading, because what is signed is not always what people think they are buying.

A fifth cost appears on no quote: the time of internal teams. Workshops, mock-up reviews, text approval, testing: a redesign mobilises the business for its whole duration. That time is not invoiced, but it is spent, and it weighs all the more when the project was poorly scoped at the start.

How to compare two quotes

Comparing totals is pointless. Comparing quotes means bringing them back to a common grid, in four steps.

• Break down. Transfer each quote into the same list of lines, noting for each whether it is included, excluded or assumed to fall to the business.
• Ask for the assumptions. Number of pages, templates, revision rounds, volume of content carried over: a quote without assumptions cannot be held to.
• Check ownership. Who holds the code, the hosting access, the domain name? Being able to change supplier has value, even with no plan to do so.
• Cost the aftermath. Add up recurring costs over several years, not just the delivery price.

One question quotes rarely address remains: who will actually do the work? The person met in the sales meeting is not always the one who will design or build the site. Asking for the team’s make-up, and for comparable projects delivered by the same people, often says more than the amount.

The surest way to get comparable quotes is still to request them on a common basis. A specification that describes the problem, the audiences and the constraints — rather than the list of pages — obliges every supplier to answer the same question.

At Maeliom Build, pricing comes after that scoping, never before: a price given without settling what it covers commits nobody, least of all the person giving it.

Common questions