Redesigning an existing website helps keep it up-to-date, adds advanced features, and enables integration with new software. This is more resource-effective than building a website from scratch just because it lacks a few features.
In this article, we’ll cover website design costs for small businesses and compare what you could spend on a professional agency vs. a freelancer. Apart from that, we will explore the reasons why many website owners opt for an overhaul of their site. Lastly, we’ll delve into the factors that affect the cost of website redesigning and how to decide when to revamp your website.
What Is a Website Redesign?
A website redesign is a detailed, high-level revamping of your website, which involves significantly updating its code, structure, content, or visuals. Although the inherent purpose of web redesigning is to improve the experience of visitors, a well-planned site redesign can lead to improvements such as a higher conversion rate, enhanced performance, and better user experience.
Website makeovers make changes to some, if not all, of the following aspects of a website.
- SSL Certificates
- UX Design
- Branding Changes
- Social Media Elements
- Website Templates
- Persona Targeting
- Inclusion of New Products and Services
The process to redesign websites consists of four primary steps:
- It begins by defining the website objectives and the metrics to evaluate them.
- Next, a website effectiveness audit is performed, which is essentially a test conducted to determine the website’s strengths and weaknesses. An analysis tool such as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threat) can be conducted for this part.
- This will lead to the identification of gaps between what is required and what is being offered on the website.
- Using this list, a roadmap is prepared to go about the website redesign process, which might include conducting A/B testing to compare different ideas, fixes, and elements.
It is important to mention that website redesign services are different from website refresh services. A website redesign is a major overhaul of a website with significant changes to the code and the visual appearance of the site. On the other hand, a website refresh usually has minimal changes applied to the functionality and structure of the website, and only minor changes to the appearance or user experience are made.
What Are the Reasons for a Website Redesign?
Whether you get your website redesigned by a professional agency or a freelancer, it is a time-consuming and expensive process. Then why should you invest resources on a functioning website?
Here are the top 4 reasons for website redesign and why doing so can add value to not just your website but also your business. After all, 88% of shoppers have expressed that they won’t return to a website if their experience is bad. This makes it even more important to improve your website to ensure customer retention.
Enhance Usability
One of the major benefits of a website redesign is to improve the website usability for visitors. The aim is to keep the website welcoming, presentable, and easy to navigate. This can include adding more sections to make the content more readable, simplifying certain technical features to make them easier to use for non-tech-savvy users, and adding contact forms to allow users to get instant support from the administrators.
Improve Website Performance
Any issues with the speed, loading, images, videos, number of inbound links, SEO-optimization, or experience of use can be fixed to improve the performance of the website. This directly impacts customer retention as the better experience they have on the website, the more likely they are to return.
Improve Lead Generation
One of the prime reasons for a website redesign is to improve the quality and volume of the leads generated. This is highly important for the marketing funnel. This can include performing activities like persona development to understand your visitors better and introducing features that resonate with most of the visitors.
Integration With External Software
Oftentimes, the website for a brand is created at the very beginning, when their operations are not very mature and the products and services are in their initial phases. With the maturity in the product and advancement in the operations, the brand might begin using tools and external software that need to be integrated with its website. These can, for instance, be tools related to website analytics. Thus, another one of the benefits of a website redesign is that it can add the required third-party tools support by completing this integration.
What Factors Influence the Cost of a Website Redesign?
The cost of a website redesign can be driven by various factors, of which some of the most important have been detailed below.
Advanced Functionality
The more advanced and technical the functionality, the higher the website revamp cost will be. These can be features such as user registration numbers, a real-time order tracking system, an in-depth calendar, or additional payment options. Apart from this, if the client wants to bring in custom features and functionality designed specifically for their website, the custom website design cost will become higher. For instance, designing custom healthcare software will require the features particular to healthcare, and this will most likely require an expert from this niche.
Website Size or Number of Pages
The larger the size of the website and the higher the number of pages it contains, the more expensive the redesign project will be. This is because there is more work required in transferring the pages to the new website and organizing the entire website. Adding more templates and photography to more pages will also increase the website update cost.
Content Creation
While this aspect of website redesign is not often considered, it can significantly alter the final website redesign price. This is because brands have the choice to reuse existing content, and the designer only needs to migrate that content to the new website. However, the brand might want to outsource new content; thus, content creation can be an added cost in the project.
SEO Optimization
If your website is not already optimized, you will need to perform SEO optimization to try to get it to rank higher in search engine results. This involves both onsite and offsite optimization. Onsite optimization is improving the website in a way that humans find more appealing, whereas offsite optimization refers to submitting your website to search engines and engaging with social media.
Design Team
The cost for a basic website redesign largely depends on the kind of team designing it. For instance, a professional agency might charge more and have fixed rates, whereas a freelancer might have lower website design fees. Similarly, more experienced designers would quote a high custom website design cost than those newer to this field. That being said, a more experienced professional might offer website redesign tips, which can vastly improve the performance or usability of your website, that someone charging much lower may not be able to. Therefore, carefully decide the level of expertise you want and the price you are willing to pay for it.
Average Cost to Redesign a Website
Now that we have considered all the factors that go into determining the price of remodeling a website let’s consider the average cost of a business website redesign. While the figures in this section have been taken from reliable and authoritative sources, they may not be relevant in all cases.
The estimates for a typical website design cost have been divided into two basic categories:
- Professional web designers, which include agencies and companies offering website redesigning services.
- Freelancers, which include experts working on their own.
Apart from these two, there is also the option to redesign the website on your own, which might even cost you less than $300. However, only choose this option after knowing the skills required to redesign a website and evaluating whether you’ll be able to fulfill the technical requirements.
Professional Web Design Costs
A professional website redesign agency specializes in revamping websites. It offers a number of experts who can guide you through different choices and advise the best roadmap for redesigning your site. A website redesign agency, furthermore, has a number of projects in their portfolio, which enables them to analyze your competition and customize your website according to your business needs.
Due to the operational costs involved in maintaining an organization with multiple employees, the services of such agencies are costly, and a website redesign can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $100,000.
Freelance Web Design Prices
Although freelance web design prices are lesser as compared to those charged by established agencies, the services of a freelancer come with certain disadvantages. For instance, a freelancer might not be as reliable as a web design company, and they might not have the kind of domain expertise that experts in companies do. Moreover, if your website requires significant changes, it might become too much work to handle alone for some freelancers.
That being said, freelancers are also highly competent and communicative individuals who prioritize your vision completely. Their rates are often flexible, and negotiation is easier with them. The website redesign cost when working with a freelancer can vary a lot depending upon the amount of work required and, more importantly, the hourly rate of the freelancer. In general, this varies from $500 to $5,000.
When it comes to the cost of redesigning a website, there is more that affects the price than just the level of expertise of the designer and whether they work on their own or as part of an agency. Given below is the breakdown of the rough estimate of how much it costs to work on different components of website redesigning.
Other recurring costs for maintenance may cost anywhere from $500 to $1,500 per year.
When Is the Right Time to Redesign a Website?
Given that an individual or a brand is aware of the changes they want to be included in their website redesign process, and provided that they can afford to avail professional or freelance website redesigning services, they would want to revamp their website soon. However, it is crucial that you perform this activity when your website requires it the most.
Websites that need redesigning usually have the following problems.
High Bounce Rate
If your website is experiencing a high bounce rate, it can be beneficial to update it. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who only visit one page of your website before leaving. In order to make such visitors stay longer on the website, a redesign might make content more readable, add a compelling call-to-action button, target high volume keywords in landing pages, make the website more mobile-friendly, and improve search performance.
Lack of Up-to-Date Content
Another reason to redesign existing websites is a lack of fresh content. Up-to-date and time-relevant content attracts users and enhances the credibility of a website. Thus, if your website has not been updated in a long time and the content provided on it is old, you can enhance your site exposure and the overall website quality by getting it redesigned.
Insufficient Support for Mobile Devices
The estimated number of people owning a smartphone in 2021 was calculated to be 6.4 billion. This means that a vast number (perhaps even the majority) of your users will be viewing your website from their mobile phones. Therefore, if proper support is not offered for mobile devices, users can experience problems like improper layout, non-functioning features, and unresponsiveness. Ensure that the website redesign makes your website fully compatible with mobile.
Other reasons to redesign a website include the following.
- Difficulty in navigation
- Content not being SEO-friendly
- Outdated appearance
