1. Website redesign cost UK — at a glance
WebAnts is a London-based web design and development agency. The figures below reflect what UK businesses actually pay in 2026 for in-house, custom redesign work — not template customisation, not offshore builds.
| Project type | Typical UK cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh (same code, new design layer) | £2,000 – £6,000 | 2–4 weeks |
| Full redesign — brochure site (5–10 pages) | £4,000 – £12,000 | 4–7 weeks |
| Full redesign — CMS / content site | £6,000 – £18,000 | 6–10 weeks |
| Ecommerce redesign (Shopify / WooCommerce) | £6,000 – £20,000 | 6–10 weeks |
| Custom web app / SaaS platform rebuild | £15,000 – £60,000+ | 12–24 weeks |
| Enterprise site rebuild | £25,000 – £100,000+ | 16 weeks+ |
Figures assume custom design (not theme or template), in-house UK development, SEO migration included, and content supplied by the client. Add £500–£3,000 for copywriting, £500–£1,500 for SEO audit and redirect mapping if not included.
Not sure what you need?
Use our website cost calculator to get an instant ballpark estimate, or book a free 30-minute discovery call and we will scope your project and send a flat written quote the same day.
2. Refresh vs full rebuild — which do you actually need?
This is the first decision that changes your budget by £5,000–£30,000. Most clients come in asking for a “redesign” when what they actually need is either a visual refresh or a complete rebuild — and these are very different projects.
Visual refresh — £2,000–£6,000
Updates the design layer — typography, colours, layout, imagery, spacing — without touching the underlying code or platform. Best when the site structure and content are solid but the design looks dated.
Good fit if:
- ✓ Site loads quickly and passes Core Web Vitals
- ✓ URL structure and SEO ranking are healthy
- ✓ The CMS works well for your team
- ✓ Content is well-organised — just looks old
Full rebuild — £4,000–£60,000+
New design, new code, often a new platform. Addresses technical debt, structural SEO problems, and conversion issues at the architecture level — not just the surface.
Good fit if:
- ✓ Page speed is Poor or fails Core Web Vitals
- ✓ The site was built with page builders (Elementor, Divi)
- ✓ You are rebranding or changing your service offering
- ✓ The CMS is uneditable or your team avoids using it
- ✓ Conversions or organic traffic have declined
The honest test
Run your current site through Google PageSpeed Insights. If the mobile score is below 60, you almost certainly need a full rebuild — a visual refresh will not fix the underlying performance issues, and a slow site loses leads every single day. See our website speed optimisation service if performance is the primary concern rather than design.
3. What drives the cost of a website redesign
A redesign quote is not arbitrary. These six factors account for almost every price difference between proposals from reputable UK agencies.
How much of the old site you are keeping
Keeping the URL structure, content, and platform reduces cost. Changing all three is effectively a new website build. A straight platform migration (e.g. WordPress to Webflow, same content, same URLs) costs 30–50% less than a full redesign-and-rebuild because the creative decisions are constrained.
Page count and content volume
Each unique page template adds design and development time. A 5-page site with one blog post template costs significantly less than a 40-page site with service templates, case study layouts, team profiles, and resource libraries — even if the visual style is similar.
Platform choice or change
Staying on the same platform (e.g. WordPress to WordPress) costs less than migrating. Each platform has a different development cost structure: Webflow is faster to design but more constrained on SEO depth; WordPress requires more build time but gives the most flexibility; Next.js is the most expensive to build but the highest-performance result.
Technical debt in the existing site
If the existing site was built with page builders, has thousands of inline styles, or has poorly structured database content, more time is needed to migrate that content cleanly. Some codebases are so tangled that it costs more to unpick them than to rebuild from scratch — a good agency will tell you which is the case.
Integrations and third-party connections
Every integration that must be re-connected on the new site adds cost: CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce), email marketing (Mailchimp, Klaviyo), booking systems, payment gateways, and analytics. Budget £200–£500 per integration for re-connection, testing, and data migration.
Where the agency is based
London in-house agencies charge £350–£600/day per senior developer. UK regional agencies charge £250–£450/day. Agencies using offshore teams charge £100–£250/day (though the London rate appears on the invoice). The difference shows in communication, code quality, and accountability over time.
4. Platform-specific redesign costs
Platform choice sets the floor price for any redesign. Here is what each major platform costs to redesign in the UK in 2026 — whether you are staying on the same platform or migrating to a new one.
WordPress redesign
£3,500 – £18,000The most common redesign request in the UK. A full custom WordPress redesign (new theme, new design, content migration, SEO setup) costs £3,500–£8,000 for a standard brochure site. A large content site with multiple post types, ACF fields, and complex taxonomy costs £8,000–£15,000. WooCommerce ecommerce redesigns cost £5,000–£18,000 depending on product count and customisation.
Migration from another platform to WordPress: Add £500–£2,000 for content migration and £500–£1,500 for redirect mapping and SEO preservation. Read our WordPress development service page for full scope details.
Webflow redesign
£2,500 – £12,000Webflow redesigns are faster to execute than WordPress because Webflow's visual editor speeds up the design-to-build pipeline. A full Webflow redesign for a 5–10 page site costs £2,500–£6,000. A CMS-heavy site with blog, case studies, and job listings costs £5,000–£12,000. Migration from WordPress to Webflow adds £500–£2,000 for content migration — Webflow's CMS structure differs significantly from WordPress, so data mapping requires careful planning.
Ongoing cost: £31–£59/month Webflow plan. No separate hosting.
Shopify redesign
£4,000 – £20,000A Shopify redesign means a new custom theme while keeping your products, orders, and customer data in place. A full custom theme redesign for a store with up to 100 products costs £4,000–£8,000. A store with bespoke product page logic, subscription commerce, and multi-currency support costs £8,000–£20,000. Migrating from WooCommerce or Magento to Shopify adds £1,500–£5,000 for product data migration, depending on catalogue size. See our Shopify development service for more detail.
Next.js / React rebuild
£12,000 – £60,000+Rebuilding a marketing site or application in Next.js is the most expensive option and is not always necessary for a redesign project. It makes sense when the existing site is a legacy custom application, when you need SaaS-level performance and customisation, or when you are migrating from a monolith to a headless architecture. A marketing site rebuild in Next.js costs £12,000–£25,000. A full SaaS platform rebuild starts from £25,000.
Framer redesign
£2,000 – £8,000Framer is the fastest platform for a high-design, motion-led marketing site redesign. A full Framer redesign for a startup marketing site or agency site costs £2,000–£5,000. A larger site with blog, case studies, and multiple page types costs £4,000–£8,000. Framer has some SEO limitations for large content strategies, so it is best suited to sites where visual impact and animation matter more than content volume.
Ongoing cost: £15–£50/month Framer plan.
6. The SEO risk — and how to price it in
This is the most expensive mistake in website redesigns — and it is almost never mentioned in agency proposals. A badly managed redesign can wipe months of SEO progress in days. A well-managed one can be the catalyst for a significant rankings improvement.
High-risk mistakes that kill rankings
- ✗ Changing URLs without 301 redirects — Google treats every changed URL as a new page with zero authority
- ✗ Losing meta titles and descriptions during migration — common with CMS platform changes
- ✗ Breaking internal link structure — particularly from blog posts to service pages
- ✗ Removing content that was ranking — consolidating pages without redirecting the removed URLs
- ✗ Worsening Core Web Vitals — a slow redesign actively costs rankings
- ✗ Removing schema markup — structured data that was earning rich snippets disappears
What a proper SEO migration includes
- ✓ Full crawl of existing site — every indexed URL documented before a single line of code changes
- ✓ Redirect map — every changed URL matched to its new destination
- ✓ Meta data migration — all existing title tags, descriptions, and H1s preserved or improved
- ✓ Schema markup rebuilt — FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Article, Service schemas re-implemented
- ✓ Core Web Vitals tested before launch — not after
- ✓ Google Search Console re-submitted after launch
Budget £500–£1,500 for a dedicated SEO migration as part of your redesign. This is the highest-ROI line item on a redesign proposal. For more detail, read our guide on how to redesign a website without losing SEO.
7. Industry-specific redesign costs
Different industries have different requirements that push the cost up or down from the baseline. Here is what a typical redesign costs across the sectors WebAnts works in most frequently.
Law firms & solicitors
£5,000 – £15,000Compliance-aware design, SRA trust signals, practice area service pages, blog for thought leadership. Complex content structures with barrister profiles and case type filtering push cost to the upper end.
Accountants & financial advisors
£4,000 – £12,000FCA compliance copy, service page structure, booking integration, trust badge placement. Typically 8–15 pages with a services matrix and team profiles.
Ecommerce & DTC brands
£6,000 – £25,000Product page redesigns, checkout flow optimisation, subscription commerce. Cost scales with product count, custom features, and whether you are migrating platforms.
Dental & healthcare practices
£4,000 – £10,000CQC trust signals, booking system integration, treatment page structure, patient review widgets. Typically 10–20 pages with separate treatment landing pages.
SaaS & tech startups
£6,000 – £30,000Pricing pages, feature pages, onboarding flows, demo booking. Startup marketing sites lean toward Webflow or Next.js. SaaS dashboard redesigns are significantly more expensive.
Estate agents & letting agencies
£5,000 – £15,000Property listing integration (Jupix, Dezrez, Reapit), valuation request forms, area guides, team profiles. The property feed API integration adds £1,000–£3,000 depending on the portal.
8. The cost of NOT redesigning — what a bad website costs you every month
This is the number nobody puts in a proposal — but it is the most important figure in the redesign decision. Every month you stay on a poor website has a real financial cost. Here is how to calculate yours.
Lost leads from poor conversion rate
The average conversion rate for a well-designed UK professional services website is 2–4%. A poorly designed site often converts at 0.5–1%. If your site receives 1,000 visitors per month and your average client is worth £2,000, the difference between a 0.7% and 2.5% conversion rate is:
Current (0.7% conversion): 7 enquiries/month × £2,000 = £14,000/month
Post-redesign (2.5% conversion): 25 enquiries/month × £2,000 = £50,000/month
Opportunity cost of delay: £36,000/month
A £6,000 redesign pays for itself in less than a week if the conversion improvement matches the above. Even a conservative 50% improvement in conversion more than covers the redesign cost in Month 1.
Lost organic rankings from technical decay
WordPress sites built with page builders accumulate technical debt over time — plugin bloat, database table growth, and framework updates that break legacy code. Core Web Vitals scores deteriorate as plugin overhead increases. Google's ranking algorithm directly penalises poor Core Web Vitals performance, so a site that ranked well in 2022 may now rank on page 2 or 3 for the same keywords purely due to performance decay. The organic traffic loss this represents is often worth more than the redesign cost.
Invisible to AI search (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews)
A growing share of B2B research now starts inside AI assistants before users ever click a search result. Sites built before 2024 typically lack the structured data, semantic HTML, and FAQ content that AI engines extract to answer user queries. A well-built redesign includes AIEO (AI Engine Optimisation) from day one — meaning your site gets cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews rather than being invisible to them.
Security vulnerabilities and maintenance burden
Outdated WordPress installs and plugins are the most common vector for UK small business website hacks. A compromised site costs £500–£5,000 to clean up and can result in Google blacklisting that takes weeks to reverse. A modern, properly maintained site built in 2026 eliminates most of this exposure. Factor in the ongoing maintenance cost of your current site when evaluating the redesign ROI.
9. How to get accurate redesign quotes
Vague briefs produce vague quotes. The more specific your brief, the more accurate the proposals you receive — and the easier it is to compare them fairly. Here is what to include.
Your current site URL and the platform it is built on
A list of pages you want to keep, add, remove, or restructure
Any platforms you are considering migrating to (or want to stay on)
Current monthly traffic (from Google Analytics) and where it comes from
Your primary conversion goal — what action you want visitors to take
Any integrations that must be maintained (CRM, booking system, payment gateway)
Content you can supply vs content you need the agency to create
Your target launch date and any hard deadlines
Budget range — even a wide range (e.g. £5,000–£10,000) helps enormously
Examples of websites you admire (3–5 URLs) and what specifically you like about them
Red flag: agencies that quote without asking these questions
An agency that sends you a price within hours of a first enquiry, without asking about your current site, platform, content, or goals, is quoting a template package — not your project. Reputable agencies take 48–72 hours to review your brief and send a considered, itemised proposal.
10. WebAnts redesign pricing
WebAnts is a London-based web design and development agency with a 4.9★ rating on Google and Clutch. Every redesign starts with a free 30-minute discovery call, a full SEO audit of your current site, and a flat written quote — no hourly estimates, no deposit required.
| Service | Starting from | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Visual refresh | From £2,500 | 2–3 weeks |
| Full redesign — brochure site | From £4,000 | 4–6 weeks |
| Full redesign — content / CMS site | From £6,500 | 6–9 weeks |
| Ecommerce redesign (Shopify / WooCommerce) | From £5,500 | 5–8 weeks |
| Platform migration (with redesign) | From £4,500 | 4–7 weeks |
| SaaS / web app rebuild | From £15,000 | 10–20 weeks |
Book a free discovery call and get a flat written redesign quote →