A website redesign in the UK usually costs the same as a new website, because that is what most of them turn out to be. MoneyMagpie puts a small brochure site from a freelancer or agency at £1,500 to £3,500. Ours are published instead: our three tiers run from £1,950 to £5,250, excluding VAT, paid once. Where yours lands depends on four things, set out below.
If your site is slow, dated, stuck on a builder or costing you every month, the question underneath the price is whether to restyle what you have or start again. That is usually worth settling first.
What a website redesign costs in the UK
There are three ways to do it, and the cost sits in different places in each. This table uses only figures we can point to, so where a number would be a guess, it says what to ask instead.
| Route | One-off cost | Ongoing cost | Who owns the result | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Restyle on your current builder | Your time, or whatever you pay someone to help | The plan you already pay. On Wix that is £9 to £119 a month, depending on the plan | The builder hosts it, and you rent your place on it | As long as you take |
| A designer redoes it | A four to six page brochure site, per one UK guide: £1,500 to £3,500 | Ask: hosting, the CMS and updates may or may not be included | Ask who holds the domain, the hosting and the code | Ask for dates in writing |
| Move and rebuild with us | £1,950 to £5,250, excluding VAT, plus £250 to bring a standard site’s content across | Nothing to us. Your domain renewal, at cost | You, from day one: domain, hosting, code, CMS and Google accounts | Two to four weeks depending on tier, in a booked build slot |
The Wix figures are the monthly equivalent of a yearly plan paid in full, and Wix shows them excluding tax. Plans change, so check Wix’s own plans page before you rely on them. The full breakdown of what you pay after launch is on what a website costs.
What does a Wix website redesign cost?
It depends which of the three routes you take.
- Restyling inside Wix costs the plan you already pay, which runs from £9 to £119 a month depending on the plan, excluding tax. The redesign itself is your time. It is the cheapest route, and it stays inside what Wix allows. Wix vs paying once adds the plan up over five and ten years.
- Paying a designer to redo it is where MoneyMagpie’s £1,500 to £3,500 figure applies, for a four to six page site; what UK web designers charge explains why a bigger site costs more. You will usually still pay Wix every month afterwards, unless the work includes moving you off it.
- Moving off Wix is a rebuild. With us that is a tier price plus the £250 migration add-on for a standard site, both excluding VAT, once.
What moves the cost of a redesign
- How many pages. Every page is words to write or carry across, a layout to design and a result to test. It is the biggest single driver.
- What the site has to do. A brochure site is cheapest. Bookings, a shop, member areas or custom forms each add real work.
- What you are keeping. Existing words, photos and posts cost less to bring across than to produce again, but only if they are in a usable state.
- What it is built on. A site on a hosted builder lives on the builder’s platform. Changing how it looks is one job. Changing what it is built on is another.
Redesign or rebuild?
There are three routes, not two: restyle what you have, hire a designer, or buy a product with a printed price that you own from day one. That third one is what we sell. A redesign changes how the site looks and reads. A rebuild changes what it is made of.
A restyle is enough when the site is fast, the structure is sound and it simply looks tired. A rebuild is the better call when:
- pages are slow and the builder is the reason, not the images;
- you pay a monthly plan for something that stays on the platform;
- you want something the platform will not do;
- nobody can tell you where the code or the content lives.
Paying to repaint a site you cannot move is the expensive mistake. You pay for the redesign, and then you are exactly as tied to the platform as before.
Keeping your rankings through a redesign
A redesign is the moment people lose the search traffic they already have. Pages get renamed, copy is trimmed and the old addresses stop working. None of it is necessary. Before anyone starts, list every address on the current site, keep the ones that rank, and redirect the rest to their closest match. We set the whole process out in how to move a website without losing your SEO.
Whoever you hire, ask how they plan to handle this, and ask for the answer in writing.
What we charge to move a site across
If you are moving to us, bringing an existing site across is a published add-on: £250, excluding VAT, for a standard site. It is a content import with no redesign. A larger site is quoted before you commit. The redesign itself is part of the build, at the tier price. After launch there is nothing recurring to us, and your only guaranteed running cost is your own domain renewal, at cost.
Check who owns it before you pay anyone
Before you spend a pound on a redesign, find out what you actually hold. Who is the registered owner of the domain? Is the hosting in your name? Do you own the code repository? Can you log in to the CMS and the Google accounts as the owner? If the answer to any of those is no, a redesign will not change it, so settle it first. We cover the five accounts to check in who actually owns your website.
Whoever you choose, a good redesign should leave all five in your name from the first day.
How to ask for a quote
- Ask for a price in writing that names the number of pages.
- Ask what you pay in the months and years after launch.
- Ask who owns the code, the domain and the content on the day it goes live.
- Ask what happens to your current rankings, and what the plan is.
If the answers are clear, you are comparing like with like. If they are not, the price on the quote is only part of the cost.