Redesign it,
or repair it?
Most sites that feel broken do not need rebuilding. Three different jobs get sold under the word redesign, they cost and take wildly different amounts, and you can tell which one you need in about five minutes.
Repair
Days
Re-skin
A couple of weeks
Rebuild
About six weeks
- One word, three jobs
A re-skin, a repair
and a rebuild.
A re-skin keeps the structure and the words and changes how it looks. It is the right answer when the site still says the true thing and still works, and only the typography and the photographs give away the year. Fastest and cheapest of the three, and frequently all that was wrong.
A repair fixes what is broken and leaves the rest alone. A contact form that has been silently failing. Pages that take eight seconds. A layout that cuts off on a phone. These are usually small, specific and worth doing this week, and they are where the money goes furthest — a site that converts nobody because the form is broken does not need a new look.
A rebuild replaces the machinery. The right answer when the site cannot do what the business now needs, and every attempt to add something turns into a fight with a platform, a theme or a plugin. It costs the most and it is the only one of the three that changes what is possible afterwards.
- Five minutes
How to tell
which you need.
Start with what it fails at, not with how it looks. Open the site on your phone. Fill in your own contact form and see whether it arrives. Time the slowest page. Try to do the thing a customer comes to do. Write down every place it stopped you.
If that list is short and specific, you want repairs. If the list is empty and you simply do not like looking at it, you want a re-skin, and you should be quoted for one rather than for everything. If the list contains anything of the form "it cannot do X and apparently that is just how it is", the machinery is the problem and a new coat of paint will not survive the year.
The free scan below does the mechanical half of that list for you in about twenty seconds — what is slow, what is missing, what a crawler and an answer engine can and cannot read. It does not decide for you, and it does not need your email.
- The numbers
What each one
costs and takes.
Locally you will be quoted anywhere from a few hundred dollars for a fresh theme on your existing platform up to five figures for a system written from scratch. Both are real products. The gap between them is not markup; it is which of the three jobs is being done, and whether the result is rented or yours.
Here: a build starts at $7,500 and runs about six weeks, and everything goes home with you when it ships. A repair is smaller than that and priced from what it actually is, once it is clear what is broken. The audit is the thing that tells us which conversation we are in — $500 to $1,500, sized to the business, and the deep read credits in full against a build.
Whatever you choose, and whoever does it: ask who writes the redirect map before work starts. Rankings attach to addresses, and the traffic people lose in a rebuild is almost always a list nobody wrote, not a penalty nobody can explain.
- Asked plainly
The redesign
questions.
How much does a website redesign cost?
Less than a build if the content and the machinery are sound and only the surface is tired. About the same as a build if the machinery is the problem, because in that case it is not a redesign — it is a rebuild wearing a gentler word. The spread you will see quoted locally runs from a few hundred dollars for a new theme on an existing platform to five figures for a system written from scratch. A build here starts at $7,500, and the audit that sizes one is $500 to $1,500 and credits in full against it; a repair is smaller than either and priced from what it actually turns out to be.
Do I need a redesign or just a repair?
Three questions settle it. Is the writing still true and the structure still right, but the site looks a decade old? That is a re-skin. Does the site fail at something it is supposed to do — a form that does not arrive, pages that take eight seconds, unreadable on a phone? That is a repair, and it is usually the cheapest real fix available. Is the machinery itself blocking what the business needs next, so every new thing costs a fight? That is a rebuild. Most sites that feel broken need the second answer.
How long does a website redesign take?
A repair is days. A re-skin on sound machinery is a couple of weeks. A rebuild here runs about six weeks, and the part that sets the pace is almost never the design — it is the content and the decisions. The studios that quote three months are usually quoting around the wait for copy, photographs and someone with authority to approve things. If you have those ready, say so, because it changes the schedule honestly.
Will I lose my search rankings if I rebuild?
Only if someone is careless. Rankings attach to URLs, so what matters is that every address that used to work still works: same paths where possible, and a permanent redirect for every one that has to change. Losing traffic after a rebuild is almost always a redirect map nobody wrote, not a mysterious penalty. Ask, before work starts, who is writing that map and whether you will get to read it.
Can I keep my content and my photographs?
Yes, and you should ask about this before anything else, because it decides how much of the cost is real work and how much is retyping. Content that exists in a form you can export is content you carry across. Content locked inside a page builder sometimes has to be rebuilt by hand, which is a cost created by the old site rather than the new one.
What should a redesign quote itemise?
What is being replaced and what is being kept. Who writes the redirect map. Where the content is coming from. What the site will be able to do afterwards that it cannot do now, in plain sentences rather than adjectives. And every recurring charge the new site will carry, with renewal dates. If a quote is one number and one word, the conversation has not happened yet.
If you are not sure which of the three you are looking at, send the URL and I will tell you what I would do first — including when the answer is a repair rather than anything I would charge a build for.
What a site costs to build · What it costs to keep running · Request an audit · matthewdscott7@gmail.com
- Live pulse audit, free.
Any URL. Five checks.
The same module behind the paid audit, run against your URL. Twenty-five free runs a day from this browser.
- On contact. Taking work now.
Bring the brief.
I'll bring the receipts.
Have a site? Send the URL and I come back with what I see. No site yet? Tell me what the business does and what it needs, and the reply starts with questions, not a pitch. Either way, you hear back within one business day.