What a Website Redesign Actually Costs (and Where the Money Goes)

Ask three studios to quote the same website redesign and the numbers you receive may not be within a factor of five of each other. That is unsettling if you are the one who has to defend the figure internally, and it makes the obvious question, what should this cost, close to impossible to answer in the abstract.

The website redesign cost is not arbitrary, though. It is mostly a description of scope: how much thinking happens before anyone opens a design tool, how much of the writing your own team absorbs, and how many genuinely different things the site has to do. Once those parts are visible separately, the range stops looking like guesswork and starts looking like a set of choices you can make deliberately.

Here is what sits behind the figure, roughly in the order it gets spent.

Discovery and strategy, the part that gets cut first

Typically ten to twenty percent of a well-run project, and the first thing a cheap quote removes, because it produces no visible deliverable.

It covers interviews with the people who actually sell, an honest look at what the current site does and fails to do, a decision about who the site is for and what it must achieve, and a sitemap where every page has a defined job. For a firm selling expertise it usually also means deciding which service lines deserve their own page and which market you are genuinely competing in.

Skipping it rarely saves money. It moves the cost into revision rounds, where design decisions get argued on taste because there is no agreed standard to judge them against. Three extra rounds of "I am not sure about this" cost more than the workshop that would have prevented them.

Content, the line item that decides your timeline

Writing, editing, structuring, photography, case studies, team biographies. Almost every delayed website project is delayed here, and almost every budget underestimates it.

There are three honest options. Your team writes it, which is cheapest in cash and most expensive in calendar time. The studio writes it, which adds a meaningful share of the total but keeps the project moving. Or you split it, with the studio structuring and editing while your specialists supply the substance. The third option works best for professional services, because the expertise cannot be outsourced but the shaping of it can.

One warning worth putting in writing: "we will reuse the existing copy" is not a free option. Copy written for an old structure usually needs reworking anyway, and that decision tends to get revisited halfway through the build, at the worst possible moment.

Design and build, where you pay per template rather than per page

Together these are usually half to two thirds of the project. The most useful thing to understand about them is that the page count is not the cost driver. The number of distinct templates and components is.

A forty page site built from six well-designed templates costs less than a twelve page site where every page is bespoke. When you read a quote, the number of unique layouts predicts the price far better than the number of pages, and it is the lever you can most easily pull. Deciding that your twenty service pages share one structure is a design decision with an immediate financial consequence.

The build then covers CMS setup so your team can edit without calling anyone, responsive behaviour on real devices, accessibility, performance, and the connections to everything else you run. Integrations are where the surprises live. A CRM handoff, a booking system, a newsletter platform, consent management, analytics that track enquiries rather than page views, and multilingual content if you serve more than one Nordic market. Each is reasonable on its own. Four of them, discovered late, will reshape a budget.

Launch, and the costs that never reach the quote

Launch means redirect mapping from every old URL to its new equivalent, content migration, testing, and verifying that tracking works before anyone starts drawing conclusions from it. Redirects deserve particular attention, because this is the step where a redesign can quietly cost you rankings you spent years earning. It is unglamorous and it is not optional.

Then there is the fortnight after launch, when real visitors find what no internal review caught. A good proposal includes that period. If it does not, ask what happens when something breaks on day three.

Several real costs never appear on any quote. Your own people's hours, which are real even when they are not invoiced. Decision latency, which is the most expensive thing in any project and sits in no budget line. Ongoing platform, domain and licence fees. And a modest allowance for changing things afterwards, because a site nobody touches again starts losing ground within a year. A small monthly amount set aside for iteration is a better investment than the same sum spent making the launch slightly more elaborate.

So what are the actual numbers

Indicative ranges for the Nordic professional services market, in euros, for a competent independent studio rather than a large agency.

A focused site for a small firm, five to ten pages, few templates, content supplied by you, minimal integrations: broadly four to nine thousand.

The typical professional services redesign, with positioning work, professionally written content, fifteen to forty pages, several templates, CRM and analytics connected, perhaps two languages: roughly ten to twenty-five thousand.

A complex build with multiple service lines, custom components, several integrations and a migration from a large legacy site: thirty thousand and upwards.

If a quote sits far below the relevant band, treat that as information rather than a bargain. Something in the list above is not included, and it is worth finding out which part before you sign.

How to compare two proposals fairly

Ask each studio the same five questions. What is explicitly excluded. How many unique templates are included. Who writes the content. What happens in the four weeks after launch. What you own and can access if you decide to leave.

The answers explain the gap between two numbers far more reliably than the numbers themselves, and they tend to reveal how each studio thinks about the work.

At Filip & Philip we separate these lines in every proposal for exactly that reason, because a client who can see the parts can make sensible decisions about which ones to buy. If you are weighing up a redesign this autumn and would like a straight answer about what your situation would actually involve, get in touch.