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Website redesign: when it pays, what it costs, and how to keep your Google rankings

When a website redesign is worth it, what it costs in 2026, the one-page brief to write first, and how to move the site without losing your rankings.

The owner of a twelve-room hotel above the harbor in Cassis called me in April with a screenshot and no greeting. Her bookings from Google had fallen by about a third in five weeks, and the only thing that had changed was the website redesign she had paid an agency €7,000 for over the winter. The new site was lovely. It had also lost all 140-odd addresses of the old one, the English sea-view rooms page included, which American and British guests had been finding for six years. Nobody had written a single redirect.

Redesign your website when it has stopped doing its job (it is painful on a phone, a price change takes weeks to go live, or it describes a business you no longer run), not because it looks old. For a small business a redesign costs about what a new site costs: WebFX puts freelancers at $3,000 to $10,000 and agencies at $5,000 to $75,000, and my studio in La Ciotat, in the south of France, starts at 1 900 € HT, around $2,200, for two to four weeks.

Whether that money was well spent is decided on launch day, by the redirects.

When to redesign your website, and when a repair will do

HubSpot asked more than 6,000 of its customers, and 57% were planning a redesign that year. Those are mostly companies with marketing teams and yearly budgets, and the figure says little about a bakery in Aubagne whose site loads quickly, shows the opening hours and takes Christmas orders. Nielsen Norman Group said much the same in 2015: "only resort to a complete redesign if the data tells you to do so."

For a shop or a practice, the first data to check is mobile. Statcounter puts mobile at 49.1% of US web traffic, slightly ahead of desktop. Sites built on older themes with a fixed 960-pixel layout can't be adapted to phones at a reasonable cost; I've tried twice and ended up rebuilding both. If visitors have to zoom in to read your opening hours on a phone, that's a reason to redesign.

Speed is usually not a reason. According to the 2025 Web Almanac, 48% of mobile sites have good Core Web Vitals, so more than half fail at least one of them, but the slow sites I'm sent are usually slow because of a few uncompressed 5 or 6 MB photos and a slider at the top of the home page. Fixing that takes an afternoon.

Two more things to check. Can a price change go live within a day or two, whether you make it yourself or send one email? Does the site still describe what you sell? A sailing school near Cassis had been offering yacht charters for two summers before its home page mentioned them. Fail both and I'd plan a redesign; fail one and it's usually a repair.

A competitor's new site, a new logo or the feeling that the design is dated are not good reasons on their own. In my experience a dated design costs a business less than a site that doesn't work on a phone.

Website redesign cost in 2026

I don't find published ranges much use here. WebFX, to its credit, publishes one ($3,000 to $75,000 for a redesign, or $800 to $5,000 per site if you do it in-house), but the same word covers new colors on five pages and a rebuilt shop with 2,000 products and a stock system, so the spread tells you very little about your own case.

My answer for a small brochure site is the same as for a new one, 1 900 € HT and two to four weeks, because I start from a blank page anyway. Years ago I agreed to keep a client's 2016 WordPress theme and just repaint it, thinking it would save her money. It didn't. I lost two days in that stylesheet. The real extra in a redesign is the move, which on a 30-page site takes me about half a day.

What really moves a quote is anything the site has to do. Booking, a client login or a link to your invoicing software is a small application in its own right, and the day a site needs one, it's a web app, which starts at 9 000 € HT here and takes four to eight weeks. I go through the bands in what a website costs from scratch.

The cost I'd worry about most never appears on a quote, and that's lost traffic. For the hotel it meant five weeks of shoulder-season bookings, and she added it up for me without my asking. It came to more than the agency's invoice.

The one-page brief

The longest brief I've received for a redesign was 22 pages, from an estate agency on the Vieux-Port, and about one page of it was useful. Since then I ask for one page at the start of every redesign, and it's the closest thing I have to a website redesign checklist. It's worth writing even if someone else builds the site.

One of the six things on it is the list of the ten pages that get the most visits, which you can export from Search Console or Google Analytics in a few minutes. Most owners haven't seen theirs. At the estate agency the third page on that list was a 2019 article about notary fees, and it was on the list of pages to delete.

Another is what you dislike about the current site, written as specific problems, for example that you can't change prices yourself or that the menu doesn't work on a phone.

And another is who will update the site and how often. This decides the platform more than any feature, and it's the main question in choosing between WordPress, Wix and a custom build. The rest are what the site is for, what must not break at launch, and the budget and the deadline.

If the content is also being rewritten, read what a small business website actually needs first. Most of the redesigns I'm asked to quote have more pages than they need.

Moving without losing your Google rankings

Most of the redesigns I've seen go wrong went wrong at launch, not in the design. The old site was switched off and nobody told Google where the pages had moved. Google still has the old addresses on file. It tries them, gets 404 errors, tries again a few days later, and after a while stops sending anyone there. That is what happened to the hotel.

Google's documentation on site moves with URL changes explains the method, and it's readable without technical knowledge. You make a list of every old URL and the new URL that replaces it, and the server sends anyone who requests an old URL to the new one with a permanent redirect, a 301 or a 308. Google treats a permanent redirect as a signal that the new page should be indexed. A temporary redirect, a 302, isn't treated that way, so it's worth checking which one your developer used. I still find 302s on sites that agencies have just delivered.

The list is the part people skip. The agency had already taken the hotel's old site offline, so I rebuilt the list from the Wayback Machine in a morning, 143 URLs and about a dozen PDFs that nobody had mentioned. Most had an obvious new page. For the twelve or so that didn't, I chose the new page that answered the same question. I didn't redirect any of them to the home page. Google says that many old URLs redirected to one irrelevant page, like the home page, may be treated as soft 404s.

I also leave the titles and headings of ranking pages unchanged during the move. Everything around them can change, but a page that is on the first page of Google for an important search shouldn't be rewritten in the same week it's moved.

The weeks after launch

Then you wait. Google warns that rankings can wobble during a move, and that on a small or medium site it takes a few weeks for most pages to be picked up at their new addresses. The hotel took about three weeks. By early June her bookings from Google were back to March levels, apart from two blog posts the agency had deleted, which I don't think anyone missed. Google's advice is to keep redirects for at least a year, longer if you can. I keep mine for good, since each one is a line in a config file.

I've forgotten a redirect myself. On a dive center's site in La Ciotat I left the 2023 price list out of the redirect map. It was a PDF the tourist office linked to, and it returned a 404 for nine days in July before I noticed. Since then my crawl of the old site includes PDF files.

The studio page describes how I run a project from the first call to launch, and the redirect map is part of the launch step along with DNS and analytics. If you're still choosing who will do your redesign, how to choose a web development agency lists the questions I would ask. I'd add one more: ask to see the redirect map from the agency's last migration. If you want someone to check yours before launch, I can go through it with you in a fifteen-minute call.

FAQ

How much does a website redesign cost?

WebFX's ranges go from $3,000 to $75,000, with freelancers mostly between $3,000 and $10,000. I charge 1 900 € HT for a small business brochure site, about $2,200, and booking, payments or a client login push it to web app prices.

How often should you redesign your website?

When it stops working, not at a certain age. In an earlier HubSpot survey, customers said they redesigned every 18 to 24 months, which seems too often to me for a small business. A site that's fast on a phone and easy for you to update can go five years or more with small fixes.

Will a website redesign hurt my SEO?

Not if the old addresses are redirected properly, and that's where it usually goes wrong. Every old URL needs a 301 to its new page, kept for at least a year according to Google. Expect a few weeks of wobble in your rankings while Google catches up.

How long does a website redesign take?

My redesigns take two to four weeks, provided I have the content at the start. HubSpot puts many redesigns at three to four months, and in my experience most of that time goes on waiting for approvals.

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