Website redesign cost in 2026: what drives the price

People who decide to rebuild their site almost always arrive with the same question: “it just needs a fresh look, how much?”. The answer depends on something few people sort out before asking for a quote. A “fresh look” can mean new colors, fonts, and photos. Or it can mean changing pages, URLs, platform, copy, and the path to contact. Both are called a redesign. One costs a few thousand reais. The other costs as much as a new site, sometimes more.

In this piece, I lay out the price range the market charges in 2026, the items that push the cost up, and the cost almost nobody budgets for: keeping on the new site what the old one already earned on Google. If you're still not sure your site really needs a rebuild, start with the signs it's time to rebuild your site.

What the market charges for a redesign

There's no official price table. The most recent public benchmark in Portuguese is a Método Viral survey published on June 15, 2026, which splits redesigns into four levels:

• Visual and usability tweaks: R$1,000 to R$8,000.
• Partial redesign: R$3,000 to R$15,000.
• Full corporate site redesign: R$15,000 to R$40,000.
• Redesign with integrations and automation: R$5,000 to over R$60,000.

The source is an agency, so read the numbers as a market range, not a fair price. The survey itself notes that when a redesign requires changing almost the entire technical structure, building a new site may be the better deal.

Notice the ranges overlap. A partial redesign can cost more than a full round of tweaks, and a project with integrations can come in below a corporate redesign. That's why the service name tells you little. Scope sets the price.

Redesign, new site, or just a visual refresh

Before comparing quotes, pin down what you're asking for. In practice, there are three different requests:

• Visual refresh: same platform, same pages, same URLs. The look, typography, images, and some copy change. It's the cheapest and lowest-risk option.
• Structural redesign: the page layout, menu, path to contact, and part of the copy change. Some URLs change and need redirects.
• Rebuild: the platform or the entire codebase changes. In practice, it's a new site that inherits the old one's content, URLs, and Google rankings.

If you ask for a visual refresh and get a rebuild quote, the vendor looks expensive. If you ask for a rebuild and accept a refresh price, you find the problem halfway through. Say clearly what needs to change and what needs to stay.

The 6 items that change the price

1. How much of the structure changes

This weighs the most. Restyling ten pages that stay the same is one thing. Rethinking which pages exist, merging services, creating pages by segment, and changing the path to a quote is another. The more the structure changes, the closer the redesign gets to the cost of a new site.

2. Content migration

A five-page site migrates in an afternoon. A site with a 200-post blog, a product catalog, or city pages needs a spreadsheet, review, and a page-by-page check. Ask whether migration is in the quote, who reviews the copy, and what happens to content that won't move to the new site.

3. Redirects and keeping your Google rankings

This is the hidden cost of a redesign. Every page that changes URL needs a redirect to the matching new page. Without it, visitors from Google land on an error page, and the rankings you earned are lost.

Google's documentation on URL changes, updated in August 2026, is clear on three points:

• Your content's search visibility “may fluctuate temporarily during the move”.
• On a small or medium site, it can take a few weeks for most pages to move to the new URLs.
• Redirects should stay live as long as possible, “generally at least 1 year”.

The same document recommends planning changes one after another, not all at once, using the example of treating a domain, platform, and layout change as separate steps. When a quote says nothing about a redirect map, it's cheaper because it left that work out. We walk through it step by step in how to migrate your site without losing Google rankings.

4. Platform switch

Moving from a plugin-heavy WordPress to custom code, or from one site builder to another, is a rebuild, not a redesign. Everything has to be redone on the new platform: forms, pages, integrations, the editing panel. In return, you shed the plugin and theme dependency that held the old site back. It's worth it when the platform is the problem. It isn't when the problem was just the look.

5. Integrations

Forms that feed the CRM, online booking, chat, payments, a catalog pulled from the ERP. Every integration you have today has to be rebuilt or reconnected and tested on the new site. That's exactly why the survey's “redesign with integrations and automation” range reaches over R$60,000.

6. Copy and proof

A new look with old copy does little. If the site doesn't generate leads, the problem is rarely just the button color. Rewriting the copy around the customer, organizing case studies and testimonials, and making the next step clear is work, and it belongs in the quote. Always ask: who writes it?

When a redesign costs more than a new site

Three situations flip the math:

• The platform is the problem. If the old site is slow because of its theme and plugins, redesigning on top keeps it slow. You pay for a new look and keep the old problem.
• The whole structure changes. If almost no page stays the same, you're paying for a new site plus migrating the old one.
• Nobody has the code or the logins. If the previous vendor vanished and the site only opens through their panel, part of the budget goes to recovering access before work starts.

In these cases, ask for both quotes: redesign and new site. The gap is usually smaller than it looks, and a new site doesn't carry the old one's limitations.

How to compare two redesign quotes

Before looking at the bottom line, check each proposal for:

• Which pages change, one by one, and which stay as they are.
• Whether content migration is included and who reviews it.
• Whether there's a redirect map from each old URL to the new one.
• Whether the platform changes and what happens to current plugins.
• Which integrations get rebuilt and who tests them.
• Who writes the copy.
• How results will be measured: leads per month, mobile speed, Google rankings, before and after.
• Whose name the code, domain, hosting, and logins are under.

A proposal that skips these points isn't cheaper. It just left part of the work for later.

How we do it at the Studio

We start with a discovery of your current site: what brings in traffic, what generates leads, what's holding it back, and what needs to change. From there, we tell you whether it's a visual refresh, a redesign, or a new site, and only then set a fixed price. The deadline is written into the contract.

On the sites we build in custom code, SEO and GEO are in from day one: structured data, sitemap, llms.txt, and robots open to AI crawlers. One example is the course sales page conversaovisual.com.br, which scored 99 out of 100 on Google Lighthouse in October 2026. Another is the corporate site for Tactik, a construction company, which we built in 2026.

We use Figma and Claude Code for design and build, with our in-house dev team. Code, files, domain and access stay in your company's name. I've been a Product Designer for over ten years, and the Studio has launched more than 600 projects since 2014, in 13 countries.

If you want to know what your site's redesign will cost, bring its URL and what it needs to deliver for a discovery through the Studio's website design and redesign service.