Commonly anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a cleanup to tens of thousands for a full rebuild — and the honest answer starts with a different question: does your site need a redesign, or does it need to be readable?
A refresh — new look on the same structure — commonly runs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars from a freelancer. Fast, but if the underlying structure is the problem, you've repainted a house with a cracked foundation.
A rebuild — new structure, new pages, content reworked — commonly runs a few thousand from a solo builder to five figures from an agency. This is where real improvement happens, because structure is usually what's actually broken.
A migration — moving off a slow platform entirely — varies most, and is often worth more than it costs: escaping monthly platform fees and plugin maintenance pays back every year afterward.
The most common reason owners want a redesign is “it looks outdated.” But customers rarely leave over aesthetics — they leave because the site is slow, confusing on a phone, or doesn't answer their question. And Google and AI models never see your design at all; they read your structure, your text, and your markup.
Before paying for a redesign, get the real diagnosis: is the site failing at looks, at speed, at answering questions, or at being readable to machines? Each has a different fix and a very different price.
“What will this redesign change about how customers find me?” If the answer is entirely about appearance — colors, animations, a modern feel — you're buying decoration. A redesign worth paying for changes structure: pages that match what customers search, faster loading, machine-readable markup, and clear answers to real questions.
Rebuilds here start with the diagnosis, not the design: what customers search for, what the current site fails at, and what Google and AI models can't read on it — checked with real data, including what AO Audit finds. Then it gets rebuilt static and fast, with the markup in from day one. If the honest answer is that you don't need a full redesign, you'll hear that too.
There's no schedule — redesign when something measurable is failing: slow loading, broken mobile layout, pages that don't match what customers search, or structure machines can't read. A site doing its job doesn't expire. “It's been three years” is a designer's reason, not a business one.
Yes, if it's done carefully — keeping URLs where possible, redirecting the ones that change, and preserving the content that already ranks. Rankings commonly drop after careless redesigns because pages Google knew simply vanished. Ask any builder how they handle redirects; a blank stare is your answer.
Counterintuitively, rebuilding on a simple static foundation is often cheaper than repeatedly redesigning a bloated platform site — and it eliminates monthly platform fees and plugin maintenance afterward. Get both quotes and compare five-year cost, not just the invoice.
Structure matched to what customers actually search, fast static pages, mobile-first layout, schema markup so Google and AI models can read the business, and answers to the questions customers really ask. Visual polish comes last — it's the cheapest part to change later.