The real cost of a website redesign — what agencies won't tell you

A founder rang us last month with five quotes for the same brief. The range was £3,400 to £78,000. Same site, same goals, same content. The lowest came from a freelancer working evenings. The highest came from a Shoreditch agency with framed Webby nominations on the wall. The brief itself was perfectly reasonable: an eight-page brochure site with a CMS, a contact form, and a booking integration.

So why do quotes vary by more than twenty times?

Because most agency quotes are deliberately vague. The line items are written to be flexible enough to absorb whatever happens during the project, and that flexibility is where margin lives. Some of that opacity is innocent — agencies genuinely don't know how much discovery will cost until they've done it. A lot of it is not. After running redesigns for clients ranging from independent restaurants to mid-market SaaS companies, we've watched the same pricing games play out enough times to write them down.

This is the article we wish we'd been able to send to clients before they'd already paid a deposit somewhere else.

A redesign quote should map line-by-line to what you actually get. Source: Pexels

What you're actually paying for (and what you're not)

A website redesign has seven cost centres. When you receive a quote, the question to ask is not "is this expensive?" but "which of these seven things has been included, and at what depth?"

Discovery and strategy

This is the work that happens before anyone opens Figma. Stakeholder interviews, competitor audits, analytics review of the current site, sitemap, user journeys, content inventory, technical scoping. On a small brochure project this might be two days. On a SaaS site with a complex product story it can be three weeks.

Cheap quotes either skip this entirely or fold it into the kick-off call. That is fine if you arrive with a clear brief, a finished sitemap, and a content document. It is a disaster if you don't, because the project will then spend the design phase trying to answer questions that should have been settled in week one.

Realistic cost: £1,500 to £8,000 depending on scope.

Design

People assume design means "homepage and a couple of inner pages". It does not. A real design phase covers every unique template, every responsive breakpoint (mobile, tablet, desktop, often a fourth for large screens), and every interaction state — hover, focus, empty, error, loading, success. A product card alone might have five states.

A ten-page brochure site is often closer to thirty unique screens once states and breakpoints are honest. A typical e-commerce site is sixty to a hundred.

If your quote lists "homepage design + 4 inner pages" with no mention of states, breakpoints, or design system, you are paying for a Dribbble shot, not a usable design.

Realistic cost: £3,000 to £25,000 depending on complexity.

Development

This is where the price gap between agencies opens widest. Three options:

• Template build on Webflow, Shopify, or Squarespace. Fast, cheap, limited. Suitable for early-stage businesses with simple needs.
• CMS build on WordPress, Sanity, or Payload with a well-architected theme or headless front-end. Most agency work lives here.
• Bespoke build on Next.js, Astro, or a custom stack with full performance optimisation, a tailored CMS schema, and component-level design system. This is what serious brands pay for.

A bespoke build costs three to five times a template build because it takes three to five times longer. There is no magic. The lines of code are real and someone has to write them.

Realistic cost: £4,000 (template) to £80,000+ (bespoke web app).

Integrations

Every integration costs real time, even the ones that "just need an API key". CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce), analytics (GA4, Plausible, Mixpanel), email (Klaviyo, Mailchimp), booking (Calendly, Cal.com), payments (Stripe, GoCardless), reservations (OpenTable, ResDiary), live chat, helpdesk. Each one is a half-day to three days of work, plus testing, plus documentation.

A quote that says "all integrations included" is a quote that has not been written by an engineer.

Realistic cost: £400 to £3,000 per integration.

Content

The single most underestimated line item. Most agencies do not write copy and most clients have not realised this. The quote covers a beautiful empty wireframe; the client is then expected to fill it with two thousand words of product copy, four founder bios, twelve service descriptions, and eighteen FAQ answers. They cannot, the launch slips by six weeks, and the agency blames the client.

If you do not have an in-house copywriter, you need to budget for one. Photography and video sit in the same category: assume £2,500 to £15,000 for a proper photography day if you need real assets.

Testing and QA

Cross-browser testing (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge), real device testing (not just Chrome DevTools), accessibility audit, performance audit, content proofing, link checking, form testing. Two to five days of work on a typical project. Almost always under-budgeted.

Post-launch support

The first month after a launch always reveals bugs that did not surface in QA. Real users find them in twelve hours. A quote should include at least thirty days of bug-fix support and a defined SLA for response times. If it doesn't, you'll pay for those fixes at day rates.

Hidden costs hide in the lines you skim, not the ones you read. Source: Pexels

Hidden costs that blow budgets

The line items above are at least visible. The costs below are what turn a £20,000 project into a £35,000 project.

Scope creep

The single largest source of overrun. A client sees a finished page and thinks "could we just add a comparison table here?" Three weeks later, six "just add" requests have eaten the buffer and the launch date.

Fix: every change request gets a written estimate before work starts. No exceptions, even for small things. Agencies that don't enforce this either eat the cost (and quietly cut corners elsewhere) or pass it on through unexplained timeline slippage.

Revision rounds not included

Read the quote carefully. "Two rounds of revisions" means exactly two. The third round is billed. We've seen clients hit revision round nine because nobody told them rounds were finite.

Platform licences

Easily missed in the excitement of build cost. A WordPress site might depend on Yoast Premium (£99/year), WP Rocket (£59/year), Advanced Custom Fields Pro (£249/year), a premium theme licence, and a backup plugin. A Shopify Plus store is £2,000/month minimum. A headless build might depend on Sanity (free tier or £79/month), Vercel (free or £20/month), an email provider, an analytics service.

Add it up before you sign. Annual recurring costs of £1,500 to £6,000 for a mid-sized site are normal.

Hosting and CDN

For a small WordPress site, £15/month works. For anything serious, expect £40 to £200/month for managed hosting with backups, staging, and proper support. Bespoke builds on Vercel or Cloudflare typically run £20 to £150/month depending on traffic.

Ongoing SEO and maintenance

The launch is not the end. Schema updates, content additions, plugin updates, security patches, performance regression checks, analytics review. Either you do it (it takes time) or someone does it for you (it costs money). Plan for £400 to £2,000/month if you want it done properly.

A clear pricing model is the foundation of a working partnership. Source: Pexels

Three pricing models

There are only three honest ways to price a website project. Every quote you receive will be one of them, even if it isn't labelled.

Fixed-scope (our preferred model)

You pay an agreed price for an agreed deliverable. Scope is documented in writing before work begins. Change requests are priced individually.

Pros: predictable cost, clear deliverables, easy to budget, easy to compare quotes.

Cons: requires real discovery work upfront. Both sides need to agree exactly what's being built. Changes mid-project create friction.

When it works: when the project is well-defined, the brief is stable, and the client values predictability over flexibility. Most brochure and e-commerce projects fit here.

Time and materials

You pay a day rate for actual hours worked. The agency tracks time and bills monthly.

Pros: maximum flexibility, no friction around changes, suits exploratory or evolving projects.

Cons: total cost is unknowable in advance, requires high trust, easy for hours to balloon, demands strong client-side project management.

When it works: R&D, prototype builds, projects where the requirements genuinely cannot be defined upfront. Bad fit for a marketing site.

Retainer

A fixed monthly fee for a fixed amount of work or availability.

Pros: ongoing relationship, fast response times, ideal for post-launch optimisation, predictable monthly cost.

Cons: not suitable for the initial build (you'd burn through retainer hours and still not finish). Easy to underuse or overuse depending on the month.

When it works: ongoing CRO, content publishing, A/B testing, technical SEO, monthly feature releases. The right model post-launch, the wrong model for the build itself.

Realistic UK market price guide for 2026

Numbers below are based on what agencies in the £350 to £900/day rate range actually charge. London-based agencies sit at the upper end. Specialist boutiques with senior teams (us included) sit in the middle. Freelancers and offshore teams sit below.

These are honest ranges, not sales pitches. You can spend less. You will get less.

Note the overlap between ranges. A £25,000 brochure site can easily cost more than a £15,000 e-commerce site if the brochure site has heavy design ambition and the store is a stock Shopify theme. Project type alone doesn't predict cost. Depth does.

Five red flags in a quote

After reviewing several hundred competing quotes for clients, the same warning signs appear. If you see any of these, ask questions before signing.

1. No discovery phase, or discovery folded into the kick-off call. The project will spend the design phase fixing strategy gaps.
2. "All revisions included" without a defined number of rounds. Either the agency is lying or they've inflated the base price to absorb infinite revisions (and cut corners to claw it back).
3. Vague line items like "design and development — £X". You cannot evaluate what's not specified. Demand itemisation.
4. No mention of states, breakpoints, or testing. The design phase will produce pretty pictures and the development phase will quietly cut corners on responsive and accessibility.
5. Day rate not disclosed. If they won't tell you the rate, you can't calculate the days. If you can't calculate the days, you can't evaluate whether the price is reasonable.

🎬 Watch: Inside a scoping conversation

How a good agency runs the early discovery — out in the open, not behind a quote.

How we structure quotes at Nexus

We started writing quotes this way because we got tired of explaining over-runs. Every Nexus quote includes:

• A line-item breakdown of every phase with the day count and rate stated explicitly.
• A documented scope with screen counts, breakpoints, states, and integrations enumerated.
• A defined number of revision rounds per phase (typically two, more on request).
• A change-request rate card so price-impact of mid-project changes is predictable.
• A 30-day post-launch support window included by default.
• An annual cost summary for licences, hosting, and recurring services so you can budget Year 1 properly.

It takes longer to write a quote this way. It also means we win projects on clarity, not on being the cheapest. We're rarely the lowest quote. We're rarely the highest either. We're the one that holds up after the project starts.

Ready to get a quote you can actually trust?

Send us your brief. We'll come back within 48 hours with a clear, itemised estimate — including the line items most agencies hide. No pressure to commit, no sales calls until you ask for one.

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