How Much Does a Website Redesign Cost?

Search for website redesign cost and the top results quote $15,000 to $40,000 for a small business site. Those are American agency prices. A Bulgarian company redesigning a ten-page corporate site will usually be quoted somewhere between €1,500 and €4,500, and a lot of owners are quoted a figure that has nothing to do with the job they actually need.

The word "redesign" covers three different jobs. A visual refresh keeps the platform, the pages and the content, and changes how they look. A full redesign rethinks the structure and the copy as well. A rebuild moves the site to a new platform and carries the content across. Each one has its own price band, and knowing which one you are asking for is the quickest way to make two quotes comparable.

Below are the 2026 ranges we see on the Bulgarian market, the costs that tend to be missing from the first quote, and the cases where a redesign ends up costing more than starting from scratch. All prices are in euros and exclude Bulgaria's 20% VAT.

What a website redesign costs in 2026

These are typical ranges for work done by a professional studio or an experienced freelancer. They cover design, development and moving the existing content, but not new photography or fresh copywriting.

• Visual refresh on the same platform: €400–1,500. New colours, typography, a reworked homepage and cleaner templates. The pages, the URLs and the content stay where they are.
• Brochure site redesign (5–10 pages): €800–2,000 on a ready theme, €1,500–3,000 with a custom design. Small enough that the copy can be rewritten as part of the job.
• Corporate or multilingual site redesign (10–40 pages, a blog, forms): €2,500–6,000. The range widens with every language and every integration that has to keep working.
• Online shop redesign: €4,000–10,000 for a standard WooCommerce or Shopify store, more with a large catalogue, B2B pricing or custom integrations. Payments, delivery through Econt and Speedy, and invoicing all have to be tested again.
• Rebuild on a new platform, for example an old WordPress site moved to a custom build with a headless CMS: roughly the price of a new site of the same size, plus €300–2,000 for migration and redirects.

For comparison, our 2026 website cost breakdown puts a new custom corporate site at €1,500–4,500 and a standard online shop at €4,000–9,000. A redesign sits in the same bands because most of the work is the same: design, templates, development and testing. The existing site saves time on planning and content. It rarely saves time on building.

Refresh, redesign or rebuild: know which one you're buying

Most confusing quotes come from a mismatch here. You ask for "a redesign", one studio prices a new skin for the old site and another prices a rebuild on a different platform. Both are honest. They answered different questions.

A visual refresh

The cheapest option, and the right one when the site works but looks dated. The structure is sound, visitors find what they need, the platform is up to date and enquiries come in. You change the look and fix the obvious irritations. A refresh fails when the real problem is underneath: a slow theme, a pile of old plugins, or navigation that nobody can follow. A new coat of paint on that site gives you the same problems in better colours.

A full redesign

The structure, the content and the design all get reworked, usually on the same platform. This is the job most owners have in mind when they say redesign. It starts with what the site has to achieve now, which pages bring in enquiries and which ones nobody opens, and it usually ends with fewer pages than before. Expect the copy to change as well. A new design around old text tends to show how old the text is.

A rebuild on a new platform

The site moves to a different system: from an old page builder to a lighter setup, from a hand-coded site to a CMS, from OpenCart to WooCommerce or Shopify. The design often changes at the same time. This is the most expensive of the three, because on top of the design and development you pay to move every page, product and image, and to redirect every old address to its new one.

What pushes a redesign quote up

Two quotes for the same site can differ by a factor of three and both be fair. These are the lines that move the number most:

• Number of unique templates. A site with a homepage, a service page and a contact page is three templates, however many services you list. A site where every section has its own layout is ten. Templates drive design and development hours far more than the page count does.
• Custom design versus a theme. Adapting a ready theme takes a few hours. Designing a custom one for a corporate site takes 20–40 hours of a designer's time, and it is the single biggest difference between a €1,000 quote and a €4,000 one.
• Content. Moving existing text is cheap. Rewriting it, shooting new photos or translating into a second language is a separate piece of work, often 20–40 hours on a mid-sized site.
• Integrations. Every connection that has to survive the redesign, whether a CRM, a booking system, a payment gateway or a courier, needs to be reconnected and tested.
• Languages. Adding a second language roughly doubles the pages to design around, the content to check and the redirects to map.
• The state of the old site. A clean, recently updated site is easy to work with. A ten-year-old site with an abandoned theme and 40 plugins has to be understood before anything can be moved, and that time goes on the invoice.

The last item is the one owners underestimate. The older and more patched-together the current site is, the less a redesign resembles an edit and the more it resembles a new project.

The hidden line: content migration and redirects

A new site replaces the old one on the same domain, and everything Google knows about the old site is tied to its addresses. If a page moves from /uslugi/remont to /services/repairs and nothing tells Google, the old address returns an error and the ranking it earned goes with it. This is where cheap redesigns lose traffic.

Google's own guidance on site moves is clear on what to do: map every old URL to its new one, use permanent 301 redirects, and keep them in place for at least a year. It also warns that rankings will fluctuate while Google processes the change, and that a small or medium site can take a few weeks to settle.

In practice, migration work covers these jobs, and a good quote lists them:

• A full list of current URLs, taken from the sitemap, Google Search Console and a crawl of the live site.
• A redirect map from each old address to the closest new one. For a 20-page site that takes a few hours. For a shop with thousands of product and category URLs it takes days, even with scripts.
• Moving text, images, files and, for shops, products with their variants, prices and stock.
• Carrying over page titles, meta descriptions and structured data, so the pages Google already ranks keep what it liked about them.
• A check in Search Console after launch, plus fixes for any 404 errors that appear in the first weeks.

Budget roughly €300–800 for this on a brochure or corporate site and €1,000–2,000 or more on a shop with a large catalogue. If a quote has no line for redirects, ask about it directly. "We'll sort it out at launch" usually means nobody has planned it.

When a redesign costs more than building new

Redesigning feels like the thrifty choice because it builds on what you already have. It stops being thrifty in a few situations:

• The platform itself is the problem. If the site runs on an old PHP version, a theme nobody updates any more or a page builder that makes every page slow, redesigning on top of it means paying twice: once for the new look, and again when the platform has to be replaced anyway.
• Most of the content has to go. If fewer than half of the pages are worth keeping, migrating and redirecting them all costs more than writing a smaller, better site.
• The site was built around a business you no longer run. New services, new customers or a new market usually need a new structure. A redesign that keeps the old structure keeps the old problem.
• You are paying for the same work repeatedly. Several "small redesigns" over a few years can add up to more than one proper rebuild would have cost.

Here is how the first case plays out, with illustrative figures. An owner pays €1,200 for a refresh on an ageing theme. Eighteen months later the host drops support for the old PHP version, the theme stops working, and the site needs a rebuild after all: €3,500 for the build and €600 for migration and redirects. The total is €5,300. Going straight to the rebuild would have cost €4,100 and saved a year and a half of patching.

The opposite also happens. A site on a solid platform with good rankings and content that still works is a real asset. Throwing it out for a rebuild risks the traffic it has earned, and a careful redesign is the better deal. How long each path takes matters too, and we covered it in how long it takes to build a website.

Do you need a redesign at all?

Not every tired site needs to be replaced. Nielsen Norman Group, which has studied usability for decades, puts it bluntly in its piece on radical versus incremental redesign: "Never make radical changes when minimal adjustments will suffice." Fixing the three things that annoy customers most is often worth more than a new look.

These are the signs that a redesign will pay for itself:

• The site is hard to use on a phone, and most of your visitors are on phones.
• You can't change a price or add a page without calling a developer.
• Enquiries have dropped while your traffic has held steady, which points to the site rather than to demand.
• The site describes services you no longer sell, or leaves out the ones you do.
• It runs on software that no longer receives security updates.
• You sell online and the site does not meet accessibility rules. The European Accessibility Act has applied to e-commerce since 28 June 2025. Micro-enterprises providing services, with fewer than ten staff and an annual turnover or balance sheet of no more than €2 million, are exempt, but larger shops are not.

If none of these apply, a round of smaller fixes may be the better spend: faster hosting, a cleaner homepage, rewritten service pages. A good studio will tell you when that is enough.

How to keep the redesign bill down

Most of the saving comes from preparation on your side. Studios price uncertainty, so the less of it there is, the lower the quote.

• Decide which pages matter before you ask for quotes. Google Search Console and Analytics show which pages bring visitors and enquiries. Pages with no traffic and no purpose can be dropped instead of migrated.
• Keep the systems that work. When we built the new site for Mindset Pilates, the studio's existing booking system stayed in place and was embedded into the new design. Nothing had to be migrated, and the team kept working the way it already did.
• Write or approve the copy early. Late text is the most common reason a redesign runs over time and budget.
• Collect one round of feedback from everyone. Five people sending separate comments on the same page means five revision rounds on the invoice.
• Ask for a fixed price against a written scope. Hourly billing on a redesign rewards the slow parts. A fixed-price quote makes every change of plan visible before it costs anything.
• Choose a setup that is cheap to redesign next time. On a site where the content lives in a separate CMS, the next redesign changes the front end and leaves the content untouched.

One more habit that saves money: ask to see the new design working before you commit to the full scope. It is the easiest way to find out whether you are buying a refresh or a rebuild, and it is how we start our marketing site projects.

The verdict

For a Bulgarian small business in 2026, a website redesign typically costs €400–1,500 for a visual refresh, €1,500–6,000 for a full redesign of a brochure or corporate site, and €4,000–10,000 for an online shop. A rebuild on a new platform costs about as much as a new site, plus migration.

Our view: the cheapest redesign is the one that fixes the actual problem. Before asking for quotes, decide whether the problem is the look, the structure or the platform, and say so in the brief. Then insist that every quote includes the migration and redirect work. That line costs a few hundred euros, and skipping it can cost you the rankings the old site took years to earn.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to redesign a small business website?

In Bulgaria, about €800–2,000 for a five to ten-page brochure site on a ready theme and €1,500–3,000 with a custom design. A visual refresh that keeps the structure and content can cost €400–1,500. Prices are usually quoted without the 20% VAT.

Is it cheaper to redesign a website or build a new one?

A visual refresh is cheaper. A full redesign costs roughly the same as a new site of the same size, because the design and development work is the same. A rebuild on a new platform can cost more than a new site, because you also pay to migrate content and set up redirects.

Will a redesign hurt my Google rankings?

It doesn't have to. Rankings are lost when page addresses change without permanent 301 redirects, or when pages that ranked well are deleted. Map every old URL to a new one, carry over titles and descriptions, and watch Google Search Console for errors in the weeks after launch. Some fluctuation during that period is normal.

How often should a website be redesigned?

There is no fixed cycle. In our experience, many business sites get a major redesign every four to six years, with smaller improvements in between. Redesign when the business, the customers or the platform have changed, not because a calendar says so.

How long does a website redesign take?

A visual refresh can take two to four weeks. A full redesign of a corporate site usually takes six to ten weeks, and a shop longer. The existing content speeds up planning, but migration and redirects add work at the end.

What should a website redesign quote include?

The number of templates and pages, whether the design is custom or theme-based, who writes and moves the content, the integrations that will be reconnected, the redirect map, the number of revision rounds and the post-launch support period. It should also say whether the price includes VAT.

Should the agency that built my site also redesign it?

Only if the old site was built well and you were happy working with them. They know the code, which saves discovery time. If you are redesigning because the site was slow, hard to edit or poorly supported, ask at least one other studio to quote as well. Either way, make sure the domain, hosting and CMS accounts are in your company's name before the work starts.

Can I redesign my website without changing the platform?

Yes, and when the platform is up to date and performs well, that is usually the cheapest route. It is a poor choice when the platform is the reason the site is slow, insecure or hard to edit.