You already have a website. It went up a few years ago, it looks tired on a phone, and the enquiries it brings in would not fill a notebook. So you ask around. One quote comes back at a few hundred. Another lands at several thousand. A third is a monthly payment with no end date on it. All three call themselves a website redesign, and all three can be honest quotes. The difference is what each one actually includes, and that is what this guide pulls apart.
The short answer
There are four ways to pay for this work, and the ranges barely overlap. You can rebuild the site yourself on a website builder, paying a monthly subscription and your own weekends. You can hire a freelancer, which usually means a template adjusted to your business for somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand. You can hire an agency, where a custom build for a small business commonly starts in the thousands and climbs from there. Or you can buy a fixed-price, done-for-you package, where the number is agreed before anyone starts. The word redesign also covers three different jobs: a visual refresh that keeps your pages and words, a rebuild that replaces the design and structure, and a rebuild that adds new content, booking or payments on top. A refresh and a rebuild are different amounts of work, so treat any single number you are quoted as a question: which job is this price for?
What the money actually buys
A website price is mostly hours, and the hours go to predictable places. Design and build are the visible part. Underneath sit the jobs that decide whether the new site works: moving your existing pages across without losing the Google rankings they already hold, writing or fixing the words on each page, setting up the forms and the tap-to-call buttons, and connecting the site to your Google Business Profile so the two tell the same story. A cheap quote is often cheap because it covers the look and leaves the rest to you. A quote that includes the words, the move and the search setup costs more because it is more work. Neither is a rip-off. They are different products wearing the same label, and comparing them by price alone is how owners end up paying twice.
The numbers, country by country
These ranges come from pricing guides published in each country in 2026. They describe the market, not any one company's quote, and your own number will land where your scope lands.
In the United States, published guides put a freelancer-built small business site at roughly $500 to $5,000, with custom studio and agency builds running from about $5,000 into the tens of thousands. Doing it yourself on a builder runs about $15 to $60 a month, plus your time.
In Canada, a basic professional website commonly falls between CA$1,500 and CA$5,000, and custom builds between CA$5,000 and CA$15,000. Canadian redesign guides split the work into a visual refresh at roughly CA$1,000 to CA$3,500 and a full front-end redesign at CA$2,500 to CA$8,000.
In the United Kingdom, a professionally built brochure site is commonly £500 to £3,000 from a freelancer or small studio, with agencies at £3,000 to £15,000 and beyond. Pay-monthly offers are common in the UK market at roughly £40 to £300 a month. They look gentle month to month; add up three years of payments before you compare one against a one-off price.
In Australia, most small businesses land between A$2,000 and A$6,000 for a professionally built site, and agency work runs higher. Price lists aimed at tradies specifically run from about A$990 to A$4,000 for a one-off build, with pay-monthly plans around A$250 to A$400 a month.
The costs the quote leaves out
The build is the deposit. Every website also carries running costs, whoever built it: a domain name, usually the price of a takeaway lunch per year; hosting, from a few dollars a month to a managed plan; and the care work of updates, backups and small changes, which you either pay someone to do or do yourself at midnight. When you compare quotes, compare the build plus three years of running costs as one number. A low build price tied to a high monthly payment can pass an honest mid-range quote within a couple of years, and a site you own outright, with modest running costs, is usually the cheaper property over the same period. Ask every provider two questions before you sign: who owns the domain and the site if we part ways, and what does the monthly charge cover, in writing.
What pushes a quote up
Page count is the obvious one: twenty pages cost more than five. An online shop, a booking system or a customer portal each add real work. Copywriting adds cost when the words are written for you rather than handed over. Several locations, each needing its own pages, multiply the build. What should not push the price up is rebuilding pages you already have and already rank with, only to lose those rankings because nobody mapped the old addresses to the new ones. If a redesign quote says nothing about keeping your current Google visibility, ask why before you ask how much.
Before you pay for a redesign, find out what is actually failing
Sometimes the website is the problem: slow on phones, dated, hard to navigate. Sometimes the website is presentable and the hole is next to it, in a Google profile that is half finished, reviews that stopped two years ago, or a phone number that differs between the site and the listing. A redesign fixes the website. It does nothing for the profile, the reviews or the mismatch, and owners regularly pay for a full rebuild when two or three specific fixes would have moved the needle. This is why we score before we quote. Our Online Presence Score checks ten published things: how your website loads and reads, whether your Google profile is complete, how your reviews compare, whether searchers in your town can find you at all, and whether AI search tools name your business. The score tells you which parts are failing, and a redesign is only worth paying for when the website is one of them.
For context, our own price is fixed and published: $499 once for the rebuild, then $99 a month for the Presence Plan that keeps the site, the profile and the monthly checks looked after. In Canada that is $675 and $135 a month, in the UK £395 and £79 a month, and in Australia $749 and $149 a month. You see the draft before you pay, and the site is live in seven days. It sits at the low end of the ranges above because the scope is deliberately narrow: local service businesses, the pages they need, and the presence work around them, done the same way every time.
Start with the score, then decide
Get my free Presence Review at spruceupsite.com. A person scores your business against the ten published checks, shows you the working, and tells you plainly which parts are costing you calls. If your website is fine, we say so, and you have saved yourself a redesign you did not need. If it is failing, you will know exactly what the money has to fix before you ask anyone for a quote.
Your online presence should make you look as good as the work you do.