What it costs to rebuild a site you already have

Most of that quote is not for a design

You are not the reader most website cost pages are written for. You already have a site. You paid for it once, three or four years ago, and the complaint is not that it does not exist. It is that it says the wrong things and you cannot change any of them yourself. Somebody has now quoted you to do the whole thing again, and what you want to know is whether that number is fair.

The first useful thing to know is that most of it is not for the look. A search for what a redesign costs in the UK, run in August 2026, returned eight small agency and studio pages and nothing else — no publisher, no platform, no builder brand — and several of those pages say the quiet part themselves. What drives the price is moving the content across, re-attaching whatever was bolted on over the years, and handling the old addresses. Those were results a search returned rather than a ranked list, so treat them as the shape of the field rather than a survey. They match what the work is, which is why they are worth repeating.

None of this is an accusation. Somebody genuinely has to do that work and it is genuinely slow. It is an argument for one thing only: asking for the quote to be split. A single line reading "website redesign" with one number beside it is not a price anybody can judge. Broken into its parts it becomes a price you can argue with, and a fair share of it turns out to be work you could do yourself over a fortnight of evenings.

What a rebuild quote should be split into

Design and layout

The look. Usually the smallest line, and often the only one the quote names.

Words

Who reads the old site, who decides what is still true, and who writes what replaces it.

Photographs

Whether the old ones are reused, recropped or replaced, and who takes the new ones.

Integrations

The form, the booking link, payments, reviews, tracking. Each one re-attached and tested.

Redirects

A map from every old address to a new one, and somebody checking it after the switch.

Email

Whether your mail is touched at all, and who is responsible if it stops.

Aftercare

What one change costs once the job is finished, and how many days it takes.

Note. Ask one question in writing before you reply: which of these lines would still be on the invoice if I kept the design exactly as it is. And if the answer is that you will be supplying most of the content yourself, that is fine, but it should not then be priced as though somebody else is doing it.

What it costs to move the words and the photographs

This is the line nobody itemises, and on most rebuilds it is the largest one. Everything on your current site has to arrive on the next one, and almost none of it exists anywhere else.

Think about where your words actually are. Not the document they were written in, which was on a laptop that has since been replaced. They are on the site, spread over eleven pages, some written by you at half past ten at night in 2021 and some written by whoever built it, from the notes of one phone call. To move them, a person has to read all eleven pages and decide, line by line, what is still true. That is not typing. That is you, on the phone, being asked whether you still do gutters and what the call-out fee is now.

The photographs are both worse and better. Worse, because what is on the site was compressed to whatever size it was uploaded at, so it cannot be enlarged and usually cannot be recropped, and the originals are on a phone you no longer own. Better, because the honest answer is nearly always to take new ones, and new ones cost you a morning.

Then the awkward truth about this line on the quote. A good half of what you are paying to move should be deleted instead. The town page written for somewhere you stopped driving to two years ago. The service you gave up. The testimonial with no name on it that nobody has ever believed. Do that audit before you accept any quote at all, because it is the one part of a rebuild that pays you back whether or not you go ahead.

Note. Do the audit on a Sunday with the site open on your phone and a pen in your hand. Cross things out. What survives is the brief for the new site, and it is worth more than any quote you have been sent.

Redirects, and the list you can only take now

Every page on your site has an address. Some are printed on a van, some sit in a Google result, some are linked from a supplier, a trade body directory or a customer's blog post from 2019. A rebuild almost always changes them, because the new site has a different structure and different names for things.

If nothing points the old address at the new one, everybody arriving by the old route lands on a page saying the page is gone. That includes Google, which has spent years working out what your old page was about. A redirect is the instruction saying the thing that used to be here is now over there. They are cheap to set up while the old site is running and effectively impossible afterwards, because once it is switched off nobody can tell you what the addresses were.

So take the list first, before you agree to anything, and keep it somewhere that is not the old site.

1. Open the old site's sitemap, usually at /sitemap.xml, and copy every address out of it into a document.
2. If there is no sitemap, take the list from your analytics instead: every page anybody landed on in the past year.
3. Add the addresses that live on paper — the van, the leaflet, your email signature.
4. Write the new address beside each old one. Where nothing replaces a page, send it to the nearest real page rather than dumping everything on the home page.
5. After the switch, type ten of the old addresses into your own phone and check where each one lands.

Note. Expect your position in search results to move about for a while after any rebuild, in both directions. That is not a reason to avoid one. It is the reason to do the redirects properly, so that what moves has somewhere to come back to.

The things bolted on that nobody wrote down

The third line on the quote is integrations, which is a grand word for the half dozen things somebody attached to your site over four years without keeping a record.

The one that hurts is email. If your address is on the same domain as the site and the mail is handled by the same company, then moving the site can take the mail down with it, on a Tuesday morning, with no warning and no obvious cause. Ask in writing before anything is moved: who handles my email, and is it being touched. That single question has saved more small firms a bad week than anything else on this page.

The rest are individually small and collectively about a day. They belong on the quote because each one either works after the switch or silently does not, and the silent ones are the expensive ones.

• The contact form, and the address it reaches — including whether anybody still reads that address.
• The booking link or diary widget, and whether the new site can carry the same one.
• Payments: a Stripe link, a deposit button, an invoice page somebody bookmarked.
• Review widgets and directory badges, some of which will not move and have to be rebuilt.
• A tracking phone number, which usually belongs to somebody else rather than to you.
• Your Google Business Profile, which points at one page that may not exist afterwards.

Tip. Test the new contact form yourself, from your own phone, on mobile data rather than the office wifi, then confirm the message arrived somewhere a person reads. A form that quietly goes nowhere is the most expensive fault a new site can ship with, and from the outside it is invisible.

Why this bill comes round again

Here is the part that decides whether you are spending this money once or every few years.

The migration bill exists because the site went stale. It went stale because changing it meant an email and a wait, so the changes never got made. The price stayed at the old figure. The service you dropped stayed on the list. The photographs stayed at 2022. Four years of small edits that never happened is exactly what a content migration is: somebody doing all of them at once, at rebuild prices.

So the number that decides your next four years is not the rebuild. It is what one change costs afterwards, and how long it takes to happen. Ask for both in writing before you sign anything, and hold the answer against the build price. Our page on what a small business website costs in the UK works through that second number properly, and it is the one that quietly adds up to more than the first.

Our own claim, stated once and then left alone. A site built here is changed by describing the change in a sentence, by you, on the day, and what you can take away at the end is an ordinary React and Vite project, downloadable as a zip or pushed to a repository in your own account. That removes the wait and it removes the fee. It removes none of the deciding, and the deciding is most of what a migration actually is. Nothing can tell you whether you still do gutters.

And if you already have a site you can edit yourself, or a developer who answers within a day at a price you do not mind paying, then none of this argument applies to you. A rebuild is then a design decision rather than a financial one, and it should be made on design grounds by somebody whose taste you trust.

Note. The test to apply to any arrangement, old or new: on a Friday afternoon, with your price list changing on Monday, can you change the number yourself before you leave the yard. If the answer is no, you are buying the migration bill again in about four years.

When starting again is genuinely the right call

There is a version of this page that argues no rebuild is ever necessary. It would be wrong, and it would have been written by somebody with an alternative to sell. Two situations make starting again the cheaper option rather than the expensive one, and in both of them a repair quote is the thing to turn down.

The first is a platform nobody supports any more. An abandoned theme, a page builder that stopped getting updates, a version of the underlying software your host will not run for much longer, or a system one person wrote and then left. On any of those, every repair is a bespoke job and gets priced as one, so paying to preserve the structure is paying to keep the problem. Ask what the site is actually built on, then look up when that thing was last updated. If the answer is measured in years, stop trying to save it.

The second is a business that has genuinely changed shape. Not new photographs — a different business. Two vans became eight. You dropped domestic and went commercial, or the other way round. The name changed. The money moved from call-outs to maintenance contracts. A site built around the old shape cannot be edited into the new one, because the structure itself is what is wrong. Rebuild, and this time write the structure down before anybody draws anything.

• The software has known security holes and nobody is patching it. That is a rebuild, and it is urgent.
• Nobody has the login, and whoever built it has stopped answering. Recover the domain first, then rebuild rather than pay for forensics on the old files.
• It is unreadable on a phone, and the fix is not a setting but a different site.
• You never owned it. It was leased to you monthly and you are leaving, so there is nothing to carry over except the words.
• The company hosting it has gone, or is going, and the deadline is theirs rather than yours.

Tip. Being on an old platform is not the same thing as looking old. Plenty of sites people describe as dated are running perfectly well and need new photographs and current prices, not a rebuild. Work out which of the two you have before you spend anything, because they cost completely different amounts.

What to do before you sign anything

Whatever you decide, and whoever you decide it with, these come first. Most of them cost nothing and every one of them is harder once the old site has gone off.

1. Confirm the domain is registered in your own name, at a registrar you can log into. If it is not, fix that before anything else happens.
2. Save a copy of the old site: the address list, every photograph at the largest size you can get, and every page's words pasted into one document.
3. Ask who owns the files, the domain and the photographs on the day the job ends, and get the answer in writing.
4. Keep the old site reachable until the new one has been read on a phone, had its form tested and had ten old addresses checked.

Note. Do not let the old site be deleted on the day the new one goes live. Keep it, or a full copy of it, for a month. Every rebuild turns up something around day nine that existed nowhere else.

Common questions

Will a rebuild damage my position on Google?

Changing the addresses of your pages carries a risk, and redirects are how that risk is managed rather than removed. Expect movement for a while either way. What causes lasting damage is not the rebuild, it is pages that quietly stopped existing with nothing pointing at where they went, which is why the address list is the first thing to take.

My site is five years old but it works. Do I need to rebuild it?

Probably not. Read it as a stranger would, on a phone, and see whether the complaint is the prices, the photographs and the missing services, or the structure itself. The first list is content and can be fixed for the cost of an afternoon. Only the second is a rebuild.

Nobody has the login to the old site. What happens now?

You can usually still recover the domain at the registrar, and everything on the public pages can be copied off by anybody with a browser. Paying somebody to recover the old build from the inside is normally the slow expensive route to a site you did not want anyway. Take the words, take the addresses, and start from those.

Should I rebuild and redesign at the same time?

If you are moving platform anyway, yes, because the content only has to be handled once. What you should not do is treat a redesign as the reason for the move. Decide the move on whether the platform still has a future and whether you can edit it, then let the look follow.