The range, and why it's wide
A website redesign for a small business in this area runs anywhere from $400 to $6,500 or more, and the gap isn't random. It comes down to whether you're paying for a new theme dropped onto your existing builder, or a custom rebuild that also fixes the technical basics underneath the design.
- $400 to $2,000: a templated refresh, usually a new theme on the same platform you're already using (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress). Fast and cheap, and it typically leaves the technical basics (speed, schema, tracking) untouched.
- $2,000 to $6,500: a custom redesign from a regional agency. One Milwaukee shop lists custom builds starting at $2,745 as of July 2026, and that's before the ongoing monthly, which is where quotes tend to get creative.
- $2,500 setup plus $300 a month: mine, published on this page and the redesign page, no different for a redesign than for a new build.
What actually drives the cost up
The redesign cost isn't really about how much of the existing site gets thrown away. It's about how much technical work is hiding underneath the parts you can see.
- How much content needs a genuine rewrite versus a light edit. A site with accurate, current copy costs less to redesign than one where every page needs to be re-thought.
- Whether the current site has any technical debt: broken schema, no analytics, no SSL, a domain that's been passed through two previous developers with nobody keeping notes. Untangling that costs real time, even though it's invisible in the final result.
- Custom functionality: booking systems, quote calculators, anything tied to a calendar or a CRM. Standard content pages cost far less than custom logic.
- Photography and content creation. If you need new photos shot or copy written from scratch rather than edited, that's real, billable work, whether it's itemized separately or folded into a flat price.
The one thing that costs more than the redesign itself
Losing your existing search rankings during the switch is the expensive mistake, and it's avoidable. When a redesign moves pages to new URLs, or moves to a new domain entirely, without setting up proper redirects from every old page to its new equivalent, Google treats the old pages as gone. Whatever ranking position, whatever years of trust, gets thrown away along with the old design.
This is genuinely more costly than any price difference between a cheap redesign and an expensive one. A $500 redesign that quietly drops your rankings can cost you more in lost calls over the following months than the gap between the cheapest and most expensive quote you got. Before hiring anyone, ask directly: will my domain stay the same, and will you set up redirects from every existing page? If the answer is vague, that's the real red flag, not the price.
Why a redesign shouldn't cost more than a new build
Some agencies price a redesign as a discount off a new build, on the logic that some content already exists. In practice, going through an existing site, deciding what's still accurate, and untangling whatever technical debt has built up often takes as much time as writing from a blank page, sometimes more. That's the reasoning behind pricing a redesign the same as a new build here: it's not a discount project, but it's also not a markup. Same scope, same price, whether you're starting from nothing or from an old site.
What you're actually paying for beyond the visual update
The new look is the part you notice, but it's typically the smaller share of the actual work. The real cost sits in: moving the domain and setting up redirects correctly, bringing schema markup and analytics up to current standards, getting the Google Business Profile and directory listings consistent with whatever changed, and making sure the new site is actually faster and more mobile-friendly than the old one, not just newer-looking. A redesign that skips all of that and only changes the visual theme is cheaper for a reason.