Website redesign: why your quote ranges from €2,500 to €30,000

A website redesign means replacing the design, structure or technology of an existing site without losing its audience. It costs from €2,500 for a simple brochure site to more than €30,000 for a fully custom build, and an agency typically takes 8 to 16 weeks to deliver it. Between those two figures, quality isn't what moves the price. Scope is: the number of pages, the features, the content to migrate and the search rankings you need to keep.

I read a lot of redesign quotes, and most business owners ask the wrong question. They ask "how much will it cost?" when the real question is "what am I trying to change, and is my website actually the cause?" Here are the numbers, followed by the decision rule I use.

What does a website redesign cost in 2026?

According to the agency Numacom (page updated 27 October 2026), a redesign starts at €2,500 for a brochure site, runs €5,000 to €15,000 for an e-commerce site and goes past €30,000 for a complex custom site. These prices usually include search engine optimisation. Treat them as benchmarks, not promises: your quote will depend on four specific factors.

Why do quotes vary tenfold?

Because "redesign" covers jobs that are nothing alike. Reskinning ten pages and rebuilding a 200-product catalogue with online payments have nothing in common. The numacom.fr guide confirms it: the volume of content and extra features (bookings, calculators) change the quote more than the design itself.

A thread on r/webdev shows the mismatch. An operations director announces a $25,000 budget for a 36-page WordPress site with new imagery and rewritten content, and a contractor immediately replies that it isn't enough. The budget was reasonable for a brochure site. It wasn't for that scope.

Every page, every feature and every piece of migrated content translates into days of work. That's why the comparison should be made in days, not fixed-price packages. Here are the orders of magnitude:

The last row is a calculation, not a quote: 15 days at €180 comes to €2,700, 25 days to €4,500. For a well-defined brochure site, time and materials (a developer billed for the time actually spent) lands in the same range as an agency, with a single technical point of contact. If you're budgeting a heavy rewrite specifically, my article on estimating the budget for a legacy application overhaul walks through the method.

Why do redesigns go so far over budget?

They overrun when the scope shifts along the way. The title of an r/australia thread mentions a A$96.5 million bill for the Bureau of Meteorology's website redesign, to the point that the new boss was asked to examine it. An extreme case, but the mechanism is universal: requests get added without anyone adjusting the budget.

My antidote fits in one sentence: every addition gets costed in days before it's accepted.

Do you really need to redesign your site?

No, not always, and that's the first saving to make. According to the agency NOIISE (updated January 2025), a full redesign is justified roughly every five years, with partial redesigns in between to keep pace with the business. If your site is under five years old and only one element is causing trouble, rebuilding everything means overpaying.

When does a redesign fix nothing?

When the problem lies outside the website. A Luxembourg agency describes on r/MarketingLuxembourg a client who was convinced "their site was trash". An analysis of their audience data showed that only 8% of their traffic over 12 months came from one of their most strategic keywords, that an acquisition completed several months earlier was missing from the site, and that a new warehouse wasn't on it either. The agency's verdict: it wasn't a design problem, it was a business problem.

I agree, and it follows from a simple conviction: companies don't want "a new website", they want to save time or make money. A new design laid over an outdated message produces a nice-looking site that converts no better.

How do you decide in one week?

A five-day audit is enough to settle it. Open Google Analytics and Search Console (the free tools that measure your audience and your visibility in Google), then answer three questions:

• Which pages bring in traffic and enquiries today?
• What does the site say about what the company actually sells this year?
• Where do visitors leave before contacting you?

If the answers point to a messaging problem, rewrite the pages concerned. If they point to a slow site, one that can't evolve or can't be used on mobile, a redesign is justified.

Which option should you pick on a tight budget?

For a brochure site, a no-code builder (Webflow or Framer, tools for building a site without programming) or WordPress is almost always enough. A senior contract developer makes sense as soon as the site carries business logic, large-scale SEO or continuous development. Here's how I decide.

When are WordPress or no-code enough?

When the site is a brochure of fewer than twenty pages, updated by a non-technical person, with no custom features. In that case, paying for custom development is money you won't get back. WordPress (the most widely used content management system) and page builders like Elementor cover the need for a few thousand euros.

I'll be straight about the limits. I find WordPress less suited to a new online product or a large programmatic SEO project (thousands of pages generated from a database). For an online sales brochure, it's a very good choice.

When does a senior contract developer pay off?

As soon as the scope goes beyond a brochure: a customer portal, calculators, a catalogue connected to an internal tool, pages generated in bulk. The developer then works in Next.js (a framework for building fast, search-friendly sites), hosted on Vercel, with a PostgreSQL or Supabase database (both proven technologies). I recommend this stack for how quickly it can be delivered and how well it evolves without starting from scratch.

Full disclosure: I run Extra Dev, which provides AI-augmented senior developers at €180/day, so I'm clearly biased here. The client works directly with the developer, with no middleman, and sets the priorities. To compare this model with hiring, see the 12-month calculation comparing a permanent hire with a contractor at €180/day.

Are AI-generated 3D websites worth it?

They're worth an experiment, not a redesign budget. In a video on the Jack Roberts channel titled "Claude Websites Just got a HUGE Upgrade ($20,000 sites)", the author shows how to connect Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, to Spline, a 3D editor, to produce spectacular animations without writing code. The animations are real and the cost argument is tempting.

I remain cautious for two reasons. An impressive 3D effect won't fix a muddled message or a poorly designed contact funnel. And you need to test it on mobile before committing, because a heavy 3D hero section can slow page loads.

How do you redesign without losing your search rankings?

By treating the migration as a project in its own right, not a final detail. The critical point is redirecting every old URL to its new equivalent with a permanent redirect (a "301", which tells Google the page has moved and passes on its ranking credit). According to the agency Burgui Digital, it's one of the five essential steps of a successful redesign, along with preparation, visual redesign, development and SEO.

Which steps should you never skip?

Three steps protect your traffic: auditing what already exists, the redirect plan and acceptance testing (page-by-page checks before going live). According to natural-net.fr (updated 22 May 2026), handling the migration of content and URLs is precisely what distinguishes a redesign from building a new site. A project without an initial audit is a project without a safety net.

How do you keep the project on track?

In short, testable, independent chunks, each with its own acceptance criteria. For example: "the pricing page loads in under two seconds on mobile and the form sends a confirmation email". Each chunk gets signed off in a real browser, not just on the strength of the code produced.

That's the method I advocate for any AI-assisted development, and it guards against technical debt (the hidden cost of badly built code, which slows down every change). I cover that risk in my article on vibe coding and technical debt, and the check-in routine in the 30-minute meeting for managing a remote contract developer.

A site generated quickly without clear specifications costs more to fix than one you took the time to specify.

To gauge your sector's digital maturity before setting a budget, the French government's francenum.gouv.fr portal lists resources for small and medium-sized businesses.

My verdict: redesign, outsource or wait?

Only redesign your site if the five-day audit reveals a technical or structural flaw, and limit the redesign to what's actually broken. If the problem is an outdated message, rewrite the content first: it's the cheapest and fastest investment.

Which decision criterion should you use?

Just one: scope expressed in days of work. Under 15 days, stick with WordPress or a no-code builder. Between 15 and 30 days, or as soon as there's business logic involved, hand it to a senior contract developer working in Next.js, and start with 5 days to measure speed and quality on real work. Beyond that, or with several teams involved, ask agencies for quotes and compare them in billed days.

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