What a website redesign actually costs: Four brackets, with the scope beside each

Search website redesign cost and you will get nine agency guides in a row telling you the same thing: $10,000 to $200,000 or more, with small business pegged at $15,000 to $40,000 and enterprise past $100,000. Webstacks, Clique Studios, DesignStudio and Orbix all published versions of that range in 2026, and none of them is lying. They are answering for a company with a marketing team, a brand system and a content migration. If you run a clinic, a trades business or a twenty-product store, none of those numbers describes you, and every one of them is a reason to put the decision off for another year.

How much does a website redesign cost for a small business?

A redesign for a small business in Canada lands in one of four brackets: roughly $999 for a single-page rebuild, around $2,400 for a small multi-page site, around $4,900 for a content system or catalogue, and $9,900 or more once it must integrate with something else. These are our own published brackets, on the pricing page.

The four brackets, and what is actually inside each

1. Around $999 — the one-page rebuild. One page, every section it needs, written as well as built. This is the right bracket when the current site is a single page that loads slowly and does not say what you do. It is not a compromise version of a larger site; for a business whose entire sales case fits on one screen, it is the whole job.
2. Around $2,400 — the small multi-page site. Home, services, about, contact, and the pages a buyer actually opens before calling. Most trades, clinics and studios land here. The jump from the first bracket is not decoration — it is the second, third and fourth page each having a job rather than existing to fill a menu.
3. Around $4,900 — the site with a system under it. You edit it yourself, it carries a blog or a case-study archive, and the structure still holds up after three years of additions. This bracket begins the moment somebody inside your business needs to publish without phoning anyone.
4. $9,900 and up — the site that has to talk to something. A catalogue, a booking system, an inventory, a CRM, a payment flow that is more than a checkout. At this point the number stops being a price and becomes a scope conversation, which is why it is written with a plus sign.

Three questions that place you in five minutes

Three questions place you in five minutes, without speaking to anyone. Answer honestly and your bracket falls out: how many pages a buyer actually opens before contacting you, who publishes the next change once the site is live, and how many outside systems the site has to talk to.

1. Count the pages a buyer actually opens before contacting you. Not the pages in your menu — the ones that do work. One page means the first bracket. Four or five means the second. If you cannot get below eight, you are in the third.
2. Ask who publishes the next change. If the answer is “I email someone” and you are content with that, the first two brackets are open to you. If the answer needs to be “me, on a Tuesday, without asking”, you are in the third bracket, and the second one will disappoint you inside six months.
3. Name every system the site must speak to. Bookings, stock, a POS, an accounting tool, a CRM. Zero systems keeps you in the first three brackets, and one usually does too. Two or more puts you in the fourth, and any quote below it is quoting a different project than the one you have.

What genuinely moves a redesign quote, and what is padding

Four things genuinely move a redesign quote: page count, because each page is written as well as built; integrations, because another system gets a vote on your timeline; a catalogue, because product data must survive the move; and a brand that does not exist yet. Knowing these tells a real increase from padding.

What should not move it: the number of revision rounds, stock photography, a page count inflated with pages nobody opens, and “SEO” sold as a line item on a build that ought to have been searchable by default. If a quote sits a bracket higher than it should and none of the four real drivers is named in it, ask which one applies. A studio that has done this before will answer in a sentence.

Do you need a redesign at all, or a repair?

This question saves the most money, and almost nobody asks it, because a studio is rarely paid to say no. A slow site with no headings often just needs four things fixed, not a rebuild. Measure it: put your address into our free nine-point audit. Weight and metadata failures mean repair; missing pages mean redesign.

Either way, if you would rather hand the work to someone, a broken or half-finished site is what our website redesign services are for.

We built the tool for exactly that decision, because we run the same nine checks before quoting anything. The full checklist is published, including the two readings a server cannot honestly take.

Before you accept any redesign quote

1. Get the bracket in writing before the proposal. A studio that cannot name a range before scoping will name it after you are invested.
2. Ask what would change the number, specifically. The four drivers above. If none is named, the number is not built on anything.
3. Ask when you see design, and whether that is a commitment or an estimate. We give a working build and the live date inside 48 hours. Whatever the answer is elsewhere, it should be a number.
4. Ask what happens to the deposit if you stop before work begins. Ours is a refundable booking. The point is not our policy — it is that a studio which has done this often enough has written one down.
5. Ask for one live link to a site they built for someone who is not a friend. Then click it.

Before you weigh a bracket against what the rebuild is supposed to earn you, put your own traffic and your own average job value into the website ROI calculator. It works out how many months each bracket takes to pay for itself using your numbers rather than ours, and it will tell you quickly if the honest answer is that a redesign is not the first thing to spend on.

If the quote in front of you fails several of those, it is worth understanding the whole landscape first. What a small-business website costs in Canada covers the from-scratch side of the same question, and the seven questions to ask before hiring is this list aimed at the studio rather than the price. If your current site is what started the conversation, the signs a website is costing you work will tell you whether the problem is urgent or merely annoying. And if you already hold a quote you are unsure about, we will read it with you.