What drives the cost of a website redesign, why quotes for the same site differ by ten times, what BespokeForge's base prices buy at each tier, and five questions to put to every bidder so you can see what each quote leaves out.
You asked three or four studios to redesign your website, and the numbers that came back do not look like quotes for the same job. One is ten times another, and none of them explains the gap. Website redesign cost is set by a short list of things, and the number of pages is barely one of them. Once you know the list, you can read any website redesign quote and see what it priced and what it left out.
Page types cost money, extra pages of the same type barely do
A quote that counts pages is counting the wrong thing. The time goes into each distinct page type. Each one is a layout that has to be designed, agreed, built, filled and checked on a phone, a tablet and a laptop. Once a type exists, the next page of that type costs little.
A service business with 40 pages usually has far fewer types: a homepage, a service page, a case study, an article, an about page, a contact page and the legal pages. Ten service pages on one good template cost little more than one. One page that does something no other page does, such as a quote calculator, can cost as much as a whole family of ordinary ones.
The words are the cost a cheap quote leaves out
A redesign without new words is a new coat of paint on the old site. Someone has to decide what each page says, in what order and for which buyer, and then write it. If that someone is you, it is weeks of your evenings, and the usual reason a launch slips. If it is the studio, it is real work and belongs in the price.
Deciding what each page has to do is content strategy, and it is a different job from writing the final words. A cheap quote usually includes neither, and assumes your words arrive on time and fit a layout designed before anyone read them.
Ask each bidder who writes the words, who approves them and by what date. A fixed price only holds when the scope answers all three.
Every system the site talks to is a small project of its own
A contact form that sends an email is simple. A form that creates a record in your CRM, tags it and assigns it to the right person is an integration. So is online booking, a client portal or a quote calculator. Each one has to be built, tested against the real system, and kept working when that system changes.
List every system your current site touches before you ask for quotes. A bidder who does not ask about them is quoting a site that does less than yours does now.
Keeping your search traffic is a job, not a setting
An established business has years of addresses that search engines know and other sites link to. A redesign that changes the structure moves those addresses, and every old address needs a forward to the page that replaced it. Miss them, and traffic built over years lands on error pages.
Moving the content is the same kind of work. Articles, case studies and downloads have to come across into the new structure, not be pasted in as they were. Neither job shows up on a design mock-up, so both are easy to leave out of a quote.
Export the list of pages that bring in search traffic before you ask for quotes, and send it with your brief. A bidder who prices the forwards from that list is pricing the real job.
Design rounds are where the calendar goes
Every round of design changes is a round of work. A site agreed page by page costs more than one agreed from a homepage mock-up. It is also the only way to know what you get before it is built. A quote should say how many rounds it includes.
Rounds stretch when too many people approve. One decision-maker with a clear brief keeps a redesign on time.
Speed and accessibility only happen when they are written down
A fast, accessible site is not a style. It is a target, set before the design starts and measured before launch. That means a performance score on a phone, text contrast that meets WCAG AA, and every control reachable from a keyboard. Meeting it shapes every decision, from the fonts to the photographs, and that takes time. A quote that names no target has priced none.
The running cost starts the day the site goes live
A site needs updates, security patches, backups that have been restored at least once, someone watching its certificate and domain renewals, and a server to run on. A quote that stops at launch includes none of it, and the hosting is a separate bill. When you compare quotes, compare the first year, not launch day.
Why one quote can be ten times another
Website design cost in the UK varies this much for the same reason it varies everywhere. The quotes are pricing different jobs.
The low quote is usually a template, a bought theme with your logo and words poured in. That can be right for a new business. For an established one, the site ends up fitting the theme rather than the way your buyers decide. The high quote is usually custom, with each page type designed for your business. That is what a custom WordPress build means here.
The rest of the gap is what the low quote leaves out:
- The words. It assumes you will write them.
- The migration. It prices a new, empty site, not your old content moved into it.
- The forwards. It never mentions your old addresses.
- The hosting. It is somebody else’s bill.
- The upkeep. It ends at launch.
Add those back to the low quote and the gap narrows. Sometimes it closes.
Half the time on my own rebuild went on things that are not pages
I rebuilt bespokeforgestudio.com between 30 September and 9 October 2026. I was my own client, so nothing waited on a meeting, and still the time went somewhere few owners expect.
The brand came first. I worked a new logo, one typeface and a colour system with one accent through three rounds of directions, and settled them on 2 October, before I built a single page. Every page inherits the brand, so a page built before the brand is settled gets built twice.
I drew and settled every page before I built it. The design file for the inner pages reached version 29 before I approved its last page. On 4 October I widened the plan from the homepage and a handful of key pages to every page. On a client project, that is a change of scope and a new quote.
Page types, not pages. The site has 79 pages. The fourteen service pages share one template, every article shares another, and the three legal pages a third.
The forwards. Seventeen service pages became fourteen, and ten overlapping guides became three. Every absorbed address forwards to the page that took it in, and addresses that should no longer exist answer with a deliberate 404.
The clean-up. A whole day went on deleting what the old site left behind, 764 unused CSS rules among them. Before the first deletion, I captured all 79 pages as HTML and as screenshots at two widths. That let me prove no deletion changed anything a visitor sees.
Building pages took five of the ten days. The other five went on the brand before them, and on the clean-up and a last read of every page after them. The site now scores 99 to 100 for performance on a phone and 100 on desktop in PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse 13.5.0, 9 October 2026). The full story is in I rebuilt my own studio’s website.
My build prices are a base, and the audit sets the scope
Every engagement starts with a free 25-minute call, to confirm the problem is one I can solve. Then comes the audit, at €450, fixed, and credited in full against a build or a retainer that follows it. It records what you have and what to do about it, and it is yours to keep, whatever you decide next.
Each build has a base price. The audit sets the scope, and I fix the price in writing before any work starts:
| Build | Base price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | €3,500 | A server set up for your workload, a single-discipline WordPress build, the SEO foundation, a strategy session and architecture brief, performance measured from day one, forms connected to your CRM, handover documentation and one month of Maintain |
| Growth | €7,000 | Everything in Foundation, plus scope across disciplines, UX architecture and content strategy, an automation layer, runbooks and full documentation, and two months of Maintain |
| Flagship | €12,000+ | Everything in Growth, plus a server or dedicated machine sized to the system, architecture across all four disciplines, custom integrations and pipelines, performance hardening and three months of Maintain |
The four disciplines are infrastructure, web presence, data and automation. Every build carries the SEO foundation. The automation layer starts at Growth, and custom integrations and pipelines are on Flagship only. The CRM connection in Foundation is a basic one. Each tier carries everything in the tier below it.
A build is paid 50% to start and 50% once you have seen the finished build, before handover. Prices are in euros, never by the hour, and no VAT is added.
When the included months of Maintain run out, you choose. Maintain is €1,200 a month. It keeps me on the system, server included, with changes within the agreed scope and incidents handled in a written window. Partner, at €2,500 a month, adds technical input on what to build next, and automations built and maintained. Embedded, at €5,000 a month, is the whole technical function. For a finished site that needs care rather than an engineer, Upkeep is €95 a month. It covers updates, security, tested backups and watched expiry dates, without the server. It runs only on systems I built or rebuilt. Every price is on the pricing page.
Ask every bidder the same five questions this week
Send every studio on your list the same five questions, in writing:
- How many distinct page types does this price cover, and which of my pages share each one?
- Who writes the words, who approves them, and by what date?
- Which systems will the site connect to, and what happens when one of them changes?
- Which of my current addresses will forward, and who makes the list?
- What does the first year after launch cost, hosting and upkeep included, and who does the work?
Put the answers side by side. Where a bidder has no answer, their price has no line for it, and the gap between the quotes is usually that list.
If you would rather have your own site measured against them, that is what the audit is for, and the free 25-minute call is where it starts. How I run a redesign, from the first list of addresses to the year after launch, is on the website redesign page.