What a website redesign costs

Nobody can tell you what a redesign costs before they know what the site has to do, and anyone who gives you a number on the first call is pricing your patience, not your site. What we can tell you is what moves the price, what the finished site should be judged on, and when the honest advice is to leave the thing alone. There are no figures in this piece. There would be no honest way to include one.

What sets the price?

Pages, integrations and content. Everything else a studio puts on a quote is detail inside one of those three, and a quote that cannot be sorted into them is hiding something.

A site with a hundred product pages built from one template is a small job. A site with a dozen pages that are each their own layout is a large one. The price follows the number of distinct designs, because each one has to be designed, built, tested on a phone and made to hold up when the words are longer than the mock-up. Ask any studio to count templates, not pages, and watch the quote move.

Payments, stock, shipping, a booking system, a newsletter list, an accounting package, a customer record. Each one is a conversation between your site and somebody else's system, and each one has to keep working when the other side changes its mind. This is where most quotes go wrong, because the buyer says it just needs to connect and the studio hears a week of work. Name every system on the first call, and say which direction the data flows.

A redesign where the client supplies finished copy, photographs and product descriptions is one price. A redesign where the studio has to write them is another, and usually the larger, because the words take longer than the layout and no template saves you. The question to ask yourself before the call is simple: does the text exist, and is it good? If the answer is no, the redesign is a content project with a website attached, and it should be priced as one.

What should a redesign be judged on?

Three things, none of which is how it looks in a screenshot.

• The checkout, or whatever the site's equivalent is: the booking form, the enquiry, the call. Can a stranger get from the first page to the thing that makes you money without hesitation, on a phone, with one thumb? Count the steps before and after.
• The speed. A page that loads slowly on a phone on a weak connection loses the visitor before the design is seen. Speed is a design decision, made in the choice of image sizes, scripts and hosting, and it is the first thing we check on any site we are asked to replace.
• The search. Does the site come up for the words your customers type, and does an assistant quote it when asked about what you sell? A redesign that drops a ranking the old site had has cost you twice, and the second cost is the one nobody puts on the quote.

A studio that shows you its portfolio is showing you the first impression. Ask instead for a site it built that you can buy from, and buy something. The checkout tells you more about the studio than the home page ever will.

What did building for the checkout look like?

Seyr is a storefront we built around the purchase rather than the portfolio shot. The brief was what a buyer needs to see, in the order they need to see it: the product, the detail, the price and the path to paying, with nothing in between that exists to impress another designer. The product images are sized to the frames they sit in. The scripts are the ones a checkout needs and no others. The client has run it since the handover, with the build documented, which is the other half of what a redesign should be judged on.

It was built to convert, not to win awards. That sentence was the brief, and every decision that followed, including the ones that made it less photogenic, came from it.

What did the shop rebuild look like?

Frank Zoller Authentic History is a militaria auction house in the United States. We rebuilt zollerhistory.com and added a shop for the pieces it sells outside the auctions, so that a collector searching for the house lands on its own page rather than on an auction platform's, and finds something to buy when there is no auction running.

The three things above all applied. The kinds of page were few and filled many times over. The integrations were the auction platforms the house already sold through. And the content problem was solved before the site was, because the house already had its archive and the listing platform we built for it, which writes descriptions from photographs, so the pages had something to be filled with. A rebuild for a business with thousands of items is a template and a pipe, and the price is in getting both right rather than in the number of pages the pipe fills.

Who keeps the code?

You do. The code, the domain, the hosting account, the payment account and every login are in your name from the first day, with our access granted by you and revocable by you. The build is documented so the next person, who may not be us, can read it. That is not generosity; it is the thing that makes the fee honest. A studio that holds your code holds your site hostage at the first disagreement, and a quote from a studio that will not put ownership in writing is not a quote you can compare to anyone else's.

Ask every studio the same question before the price: if we part ways in a year, what do I have? The answer should be a repository, a domain and a hosting account you can log into without them. Anything less is rent, and rent is the one cost of a redesign that never appears on the quote.

When should you not redesign?

More often than a studio will tell you, because a studio is paid for the rebuild and not for the advice.

• When the current site sells. If people buy, book or call from it, the redesign risks the thing that works for the thing that looks newer. Fix the slowest page and leave the rest.
• When the problem is traffic, not the site. A site nobody visits does not need a new design; it needs search work, ads or content, and all three are cheaper than a rebuild and reversible.
• When the words are the problem. A site that says nothing clear will say nothing clear in a new layout. Rewrite first. Sometimes that is the whole job.
• When the checkout belongs to someone else. A store on a platform with its own checkout does not need a custom build to sell more; it needs the template tidied and the product pages written.
• When you cannot name the number. A redesign without a target, whether orders, enquiries, speed or a ranking, cannot be judged, and a project that cannot be judged cannot succeed.

If none of those is you, the redesign is worth pricing, and the price will come from the three things at the top of this page. Bring the list of systems, the state of the words and the number you want the site to hit. Then the quote is about the work, which is the only thing it should ever have been about.