Websites are an important digital asset that brings you customers. If your website is not engaging, drawing traffic, or increasing sales, you should consider a website revamp. Otherwise, it will remain nothing more than an expense that burdens your startup.
Some founders need help assessing the cost of website redesign, which can range between $3,000 and $75,000. Unless you’re aware of the factors involved, you might end up paying more than reasonable. On this note, an expensive website redesign cost doesn’t always equal quality work.
I’m Stan Burenko, Uptech’s Head of Business Development. Over the past 8+ years, we’ve helped startups in various industries build and redesign their websites. We don’t only deliver visually pleasing web pages but also ensure secure, robust, and high-performing backend web infrastructure.
Startups like Eatable, Nomad, and Plai partnered with Uptech to build responsive, engaging websites that reflect their brand values. And they have done so at a reasonable cost. In this article, I’ll guide you in estimating the cost of revamping your website. And if you need to redesign your mobile app, check out this guide.
Why Redesign Your Website?
Some startups build their websites and expect them to stay relevant for years. But if your website is suffering from these symptoms, a revamp is overdue.
Accelerate loading speed
As you add more content to your website, it becomes more complicated. If it’s hosted on an outdated infrastructure, web pages might load slowly. And that risks turning visitors away. According to Google, 32% more people would leave a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. You can remodel your website to remove unnecessary components and accelerate load time.
Improve user engagement
If your website isn’t designed with UI/UX best practices, users won’t have a good experience interacting with it. This translates into a high bounce rate, low conversion, and short engagement time. Redesigning is a sensible option if you want a website that brings in leads.
Zoom in on the metrics to measure product success for startups.
Increase SEO performance
Websites might rank poorly on Google for several reasons, with site structure, security, and on-page experience being some of them. Redeveloping your website and creating SEO-optimized content can increase search visibility.
Improve brand image
A poorly designed website will impact your brand reputation. Imagine if users landed only your website only to find low-quality visuals, bad copywriting, and a misaligned menu. They’ll unlikely form a long-lasting relationship with your brand. In that case, redecorating your website can make your brand looks more attractive.
What Affects The Website Redesign Cost
Every website is built differently, and redesign works are influenced by these factors.
1. Website’s size
Redesigning a smaller website costs less, while revamping a larger website will result in a higher website redevelopment cost. That’s because it takes more time to work on the content, visuals, integrations, and functionalities of larger websites. Different web developers would have different standards for website sizes, but here’s a common guideline.
- Small website: 1 to 40 pages
- Medium website: 50 to 150 pages
- Large website : >150 pages
2. Complexity of the website
Websites with minimal functionality are cheaper to redesign. Likewise, startups pay more to revamp a complex, interactive, and feature-rich website. For example, website redesign pricing for a static plumbing business website can be as slow as $5,000, but rebuilding a multi-store eCommerce website can cost $50,000 or more.
3. Complexity of the design
Imagine redesigning a one-page website vs. a 3D virtual tour real estate website. If your website has a minimalist layout with little or no graphic elements, the average cost of website redesign is fairly affordable.
For example, TheShineApp, is a fairly simple website with mostly informational content and minimum interactive controls. The website revamp cost will be minimal.
However, you’ll need a larger website redesign budget for a website with lots of visual components, animation, and interactive elements. Spotify, which allows users to play, organize, and purchase music, is a more complex website. It requires more work in coding, designing, and testing different functionalities, such as payment, search, and audio streaming.
4. Level of customization
Off-the-shelf templates let you build websites quickly from scratch, but they cannot adapt to changing requirements. When redesigning your website, customization is often required. The question is—to what degree? The cost is low if it involves minor modifications of the website’s theme. However, be prepared to pay more if web developers spend hours creating a tailored design to match your brand.
5. Content Management System (CMS)
To answer how much does a website redesign costs, it’s important to consider the CMS it uses. Most websites are built on WordPress, which is free. While you pay nothing for WordPress, you might spend more time on customization, plugins, and integration. This is even more pronounced for larger sites. On the other hand, you can opt for vendor-specific CMS, which requires a subscription or one-time payment. The upside is it takes less time to rebuild the site.
6. Responsive Design
Today, most internet users access websites with mobile browsers. Designing a responsive website allows all users to enjoy an equally engaging experience. You can do so by modifying the existing site or creating a new mobile version. Either way, you’ll need to pay developers for the additional hours committed.
7. Developer expertise
Obviously, working with an expert developer will result in a higher website redesign price. The experience, skills, and business acumen they bring to the project will result in a high-quality, purposeful, and functional site.
On the other hand, inexperienced developers often charge a cheaper rate, but be mindful of delays and misaligned expectations affecting the final outcome.
As a comparison.
- Junior web developers in the US charge $27 per hour;
- Senior web developers in the US charge $46 per hour or more.
Learn more about what goes into app design cost in our guide.
8. The party engaged in redesign work
Depending on who you collaborate with, the cost to update a website can vary significantly. Usually, founders turn to freelancers, agencies, or in-house developers to rebuild their websites. Each option has its pros and cons and requires a different budget.
In-house developers
This appears to be the most cost-friendly option because in-house developers receive fix salaries. The cost to redesign a website can be as low as $1,000 per site. However, sustaining in-house developers might turn out more costly in the long run if you don’t have enough profitable work to fill their pipeline.
Freelancers
Freelancers are more expensive than in-house web developers, but there’s more flexibility in financial arrangements. Typically, they charge between $300 to $5,000 per website, but there’s no long-term commitment involved. The only worry is that they might produce low-quality work.
Web development agencies
Engaging an agency to redesign your website can cost between $15,000 to $75,000. Despite being the costliest option, agencies offer quality, timeliness, and a broad range of expertise that in-house developers and freelancers couldn’t. Moreover, agencies provide comprehensive product development services that help you scale your web solutions.
Find top 10 platforms for hiring UI/UX designers
For example, you might need an SEO consultant, copywriter, and marketer when redesigning your website. An agency can bring these experts together on their team. All you need to do is to state your requirements to the project manager. Conversely, you’ll need to hire additional talents to complement in-house or freelance developers.
How to Calculate Your Website Redesign Costs: 6 Main Steps
Redesigning a website can result in a substantial investment. Estimating the cost helps you prepare an adequate budget. Here’s how.
1. Define the redesign scope
Set clear goals so you can anticipate the type of work involved in the redesign effort. Do you need a simple visual uplift or an overhaul of the CMS, database, and entire web content? Sometimes, a website requires SEO optimization, copywriting, UI/UX optimization, a larger database, and other additional features.
2. Evaluate website size and complexity
Conduct an audit of the existing website and list the number of pages and functional modules. This will help you estimate the time spent reworking it. Generally, simpler websites are faster and easier to revamp than large, complex websites.
3. Determine the level of integration and customization
If you are struggling to manage different plugins, that’s a sign that developers will need to perform extensive integration. Meanwhile, expensive customization is required if you’re at limits with ready-made templates.
4. Decide on content creation requirements
The redesign cost is cheaper if you reuse the same content on the new website. However, if you need to create new content or revise existing ones, there are additional fees involved. Whether you create new blogs, videos, or images, they count towards the final website redesign price.
5. Choose the CMS
WordPress and Wix are popular CMSs, but some web agencies offer their own proprietary CMSs at a fee. Explore the advantages of migrating to a new CMS and decide if it’s worth paying.
6. Consider ongoing support
After your new website goes live, you may need to make minor changes, such as editing product descriptions and replacing photos. Determine if the redesign cost covers long-term these support tasks.
There are many factors involved when calculating website redesign costs. If they overwhelm you, reach out to Uptech and get an accurate quote.
3 Key Elements of a Successful Website Redesign
Chances are, you want your new website to be faster, more engaging, or more visible in search. Here’s what to focus on to get those results.
SEO strategy
Ranking your website on Google requires a good understanding of legit SEO practices. For example, Google prioritizes web content that answers the search intent with helpful information and demonstrates the author’s expertise. Besides SEO-optimized content, site speed and security also affect search ranking. For example, Google started testing HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014 to ensure web users enjoy a safe experience browsing online.
When revamping your site, an SEO specialist will structure your web pages so that Google’s bot can easily crawl all of them. Also, it’s equally important to group web pages with similar topics together to increase topical authority.
Mobile optimization
Don’t neglect mobile users when redesigning your website. If your website is not mobile-optimized, users will face difficulties reading the text or interacting with the menus. Eventually, they become frustrated with the attempts and leave the website.
So, ensure that mobile users enjoy the same experience as desktop users do. Therefore, your website should automatically render elements to fit the limited space. For example, developers hide menus in the hamburger icon instead of spreading them out to create a more compact layout.
Read our expert guide on how to build a custom mobile app!
Another point to consider is mobile browsers are less powerful than their desktop counterpart. A webpage that loads smoothly on a desktop might be slower on mobile. To overcome that, developers use accelerated mobile pages, caches, or compressed files to speed up load time.
User experience
User experience, or UX, involves making the entire user journey as pleasant as possible. This means understanding what they are searching for and seamlessly guiding them toward the solution. A website optimized for UX is uncluttered, understandable, and navigable. For example, concise text, clearly labeled forms, button placement, and other aesthetics contribute to website usability.
Besides visual designs, accessibility is also an important UX element. Specially abled users should be able to interact and consume information on the site like all users. This could mean adding video content, transcription, and assistive navigation to the website.
Unless you’re working with a web developer who understands UX, the revamped website might not be engaging. That’s why startups like GOAT, Aspiration, and Unilever turn to Uptech. By adopting user-first design, our UI/UX specialists help create products that users love.
Website Redesign: Timeline and Process
Revamping simpler sites is faster, while remodeling a complex website is a big design process that take more time. Here’s what typically happens when we redesign a website.
Strategic planning (2-8 weeks)
First, our team thoroughly analyzes your website to understand its strengths and limitations better. We want to know your target audience, business model, purposes, and strategies before proceeding.
Through a series of discovery sessions, we ask startup teams questions that help us define web performance metrics, persona, technical requirements, and content strategy. Then, we document what we learn in creative briefs and technical specifications for our web designers.
Design (1-4 weeks)
Next, our designers create wireframes and mockups so we can validate the web design with a selected group of users. This is important because we want to avoid developing a site that users don’t find useful. So, we let users test the mockup pages and seek their feedback. We use their feedback to revise the requirements before passing them to the web developers.
Development (5-15 weeks)
This is where your website starts to take shape. Our web developers integrate different components based on the approved architecture. We pay equal attention to front-facing elements and back-end services, including third-party integration, database, site security, CMS, and other functional components.
Testing (1-3 weeks)
Eventually, the new website is ready for testing. We let you review the website and ensure it aligns with your business needs. We have our QA team that make sure that the web experience remains consistent on different devices. Based on all the test results, we might make some changes before launching the website.
Launch (1-2 weeks)
Once we’re confident that your website passes all quality assurance checks, we schedule it for public release. We’ll make necessary changes to the DNS records and webservers to replace your old website with the new one. During the transition, our team is on standby to respond to any events.
How to Reduce Website Redesign Cost
So, how much should a website redesign cost? The figure varies, but if you’re not mindful, you might pay more than budgeted to redesign a website. For startups, that means lesser fund allocation for other business activities. So, follow these tips to avoid unnecessary spending.
Use an open-source CMS
If you’re hosting a relatively simple website, it’s better to use a free CMS like WordPress, Joomla, or SilverStripe. These CMS provide free-to-use templates that designers can make minor modifications. Only consider a proprietary CMS if you find it more feasible.
Prioritize important features
It’s tempting to include many features in the new website. However, doing so increases the rework cost. Decide which features are more impactful and will solve immediate business needs. This way, you can maximize your savings when redeveloping your website.
Consider outsourcing
Outsourcing can reduce the fee you pay for web redesign. Instead of hiring and retaining a team of in-house developers, you can engage web developers on a project basis. Some startups outsource to Ukraine because they can get an even lower rate without compromising quality. For example, you pay $100 per hour when hiring US web developers but $50 per hour when outsourcing to developers in Ukraine.
How to Choose the Right Web Design Partner
Understandably, deciding which web developer to partner with can be tough because there are so many choices. Yet, it’s crucial that you work with one that aligns with your goal, budget, and requirements. More importantly, you want to work with a web developer you can trust.
So, take these into consideration when comparing web developers.
Industry experience
It’s better to engage a web developer who has worked on similar projects. Otherwise, the developer might need more time to analyze your business, competitors, and industry trends. Some agencies, like Uptech, have launched successful websites in various industries, including healthcare, fintech, and real estate.
Client reviews
Find out how other clients felt after working with the web developers. You can read their reviews on independent review sites like Clutch and GoodFirm. Their testimonials reveal the quality, professionalism, communication, and teamwork you can expect from the candidate.
Design-centric approach
Building a website goes beyond putting together text and buttons on a webpage. To create a high-quality website, the developer needs to integrate design thinking with web development. So, look for developers who think from the user perspective and apply innovative technologies to meet your business goals.
Explore how we apply design thinking in our work.
Cultural fit and communication
The cheapest option is seldom the best choice, particularly if the developer struggles to communicate in your language. Misaligned expectations and communication breakdown can result in project delays or failure. Uptech, being a Ukrainian company with an international presence, poses no such issues. Not only do we communicate fluently in English, but we also share common Western work ethics.
Website Redesign: Uptech’s Cases
Uptech is an app design and development company that helps startups worldwide build websites and apps their customers love. These are some of our notable works.
RSVP
RSVP is an app that lets users plan holidays with their friends and family. When its founder approached us, they needed to redesign their app to suit evolving market needs. Instead of rushing into coding, our team consulted the founder to get more details.
We wanted to know what features are important and their expectations so we could align our development effort accordingly. As a result, we delivered on time, within budget, and with additional features that add more value to the app.
Eatable
Eatable is a ghost kitchen startup that lets restaurant owners run their businesses more effectively online. However, Eatable faced a problem—its existing web app is difficult to scale. Specifically, users find uploading new menus challenging and tedious.
In the redesign effort, our team took time to understand how ghost kitchen operates and what restaurant owners expect from the platform. One of the improvements we made is creating a more efficient menu system. Instead of spending hours, restaurant operators can add and edit their menus on Eatable within minutes.
Nomad
Nomad attempts to improve the house-buying experience in the Middle East. They had an idea of how to achieve that but needed a reliable app development partner to realize their product. In this project, our mission is to build a real estate platform from scratch.
Right from the start, our team made sure that we noted the requirements of the founder. Then, we moved on to discovery, where we validate ideas with real users. As the project continued, we made changes when and as necessary. At the same time, we paid attention to the timeline. We delivered an MVP with essential features that engage users throughout their entire journey.
Conclusion
Website redesign is necessary if you experience slow-loading pages, decreasing traffic, or a dismal conversion rate. Or simply to stay abreast with modern trends. The fee to revamp a website varies greatly, depending on complexity, size, customization, and other factors.
In this article, I’ve shown how much to redesign a website and revealed important areas to focus on if you want a new, engaging site. Simply put, your site has to be SEO-friendly, fast, engaging, and mobile-responsive. Finding a reliable web developer, however, is a different challenge.
Ideally, you’ll want to work with a web development team that is mindful of your time and cost concerns while assuring quality deliverables. Uptech has been the preferred partner of 150+ startups since 2016. And we’re ready to help you with yours.
Redesign your website with Uptech. Talk to us now.