A $5,000 template refresh and a $150,000 rebuild both get called "a website redesign." Then someone requests three quotes without scoping the project and compares numbers that don't describe the same work.
That's how a redesign that started on a small-business budget discovers halfway through that it needed enterprise scope. Not because anyone lied. Because "redesign" is a word that covers two completely different engineering jobs, and the person buying it usually can't tell which one they're in until the content migration starts.
Broad shape for 2026: roughly $3,000 at the small-business end, past $250,000 for complex enterprise builds, with most mid-market work landing between $40,000 and $100,000. Those ranges are almost useless on their own. What matters is which drivers your project actually has.
What actually moves the number
- Unique page templates. Not pages — templates. A homepage, product page, service page, blog post, and landing page are five separate design-and-build efforts, each wireframed, built, made responsive, tested, and wired into the CMS. Small sites might need 3 to 5. Large ones run past 15. Figure $1,500 to $5,000 per additional template depending on complexity.
- Custom features and third-party integrations. Every integration means research, API configuration, testing, and ongoing support. The ones that hurt are the ones needing custom middleware or two-way data sync, because those keep costing after launch.
- Content migration. The most underestimated line by a wide margin. If content is inconsistently structured or spread across platforms, migration alone eats 10 to 20% of the project budget. Automated tools help with extraction and reformatting; manual review is still where the quality comes from. New copy runs $100 to $300 per page.
- Accessibility. WCAG 2.1 AA means semantic HTML, keyboard navigation, contrast checks, ARIA attributes, and testing every template. It's real hours. Skipping it saves money up front and buys legal risk later.
- Timeline. Rushed deadlines and vague scope both inflate cost, for opposite reasons — one buys overtime, the other buys rework.
The one that quietly costs the most
SEO migration. It is the cheapest thing to skip and the most expensive thing to have skipped.
You need a URL map with 301s from every old path, meta and schema carried across, header structure and alt text preserved, and performance that doesn't regress on mobile. Get it wrong and you launch a beautiful site that lost its organic traffic, which nobody notices for six weeks because everyone is looking at the design.
Build the redirect map during development, not during launch week. It's the artifact that makes the difference between a redesign and an outage with better typography.
What does AI actually take off the bill?
Real, but narrower than the pitch suggests. It compresses the repetitive middle of the project:
- Scanning an existing site, extracting content, reformatting it for new templates — genuinely useful on large blogs and news archives.
- Resizing, compressing, and tagging images. Auto-generating alt text saves dozens of hours on an image-heavy migration.
- Automated passes for broken links, accessibility issues, and performance bottlenecks.
Where it stops: brand narrative, custom integrations against proprietary systems, and interpreting compliance requirements. Automate deliberately — not everywhere at once. On a small project the savings are meaningful. On a complex custom build, automation optimizes the process rather than replacing the expensive part of it.
The number nobody puts in the quote
Ongoing maintenance runs 15 to 20% of build cost, annually. Security patches, CMS updates, performance monitoring, bug fixes.
On a $60,000 build that's $9,000 to $12,000 a year, every year, and it is almost never in the proposal you're comparing. Neither is custom photography ($3,000 to $15,000), video ($5,000 to $25,000 per video), hosting, or premium plugin licensing.
Two things that make a quote comparable: insist on itemized proposals that include content migration, maintenance, and media production as explicit lines, and reserve 10 to 15% for contingency. Scope creep is not a sign anyone failed. It is the default state of a project where the content turns out messier than the audit suggested.
The design is the part everyone argues about and the part that costs the least to change. The redirect map, the integration surface, and the annual maintenance line are the ones that decide whether the number you were quoted resembles the number you pay.
Full breakdown — pricing by business size, all seven cost drivers, and a budgeting checklist: teamvoy.com/blog/website-redesign-cost
Written by Zhanna Yuskevych, CPO at Teamvoy. More engineering writing at teamvoy.com/blog.
