A website redesign in Australia is quoted at the same numbers as a brand new website. Prices read off provider websites on 3 August 2026 ran from $995 at the template end (Havealook, Cheap Websites) up to $5,600 at Tradie Web Guys and $7,500 for a trades and construction build at WebApex, with the common agency shape at $3,000 to $10,000 upfront plus $500 to $2,000 a month afterwards. The word redesign sounds like it should earn a discount for the site you already own. It rarely does, and understanding why is the most useful thing you can do before signing anything.
Why a redesign gets priced like a new build
Ask what is being reused. On most projects the honest answer is your domain, your logo, your photographs and your list of services. Everything underneath belongs to the platform it was made on: the theme, the page templates, the plugin configuration, the way content is stored and retrieved. None of that travels from Wix into WordPress, or from WordPress into coded pages, or out of a drag-and-drop builder into anything at all. It gets remade, and the old version gets switched off.
There are 2 situations where a redesign genuinely is the cheaper purchase. The first is a restyle inside the platform you already have: same pages, same addresses, same words, new presentation. The second is a site whose writing is already earning impressions, where the work is structural and the text moves across untouched. Both are far smaller jobs than what people picture when they say redesign.
So when a quote arrives low because it is "only a redesign", put one question in writing: which pages, files and content are you carrying across, and which are you rebuilding? A quote that cannot answer that is a new-build quote wearing a friendlier word, and it will find the extra scope later.
Australian prices, as published on 3 August 2026
Every figure below was read off the provider's own website on that date. The bands are ours. The prices are theirs, quoted as written, and nothing is included here that we could not attribute to a named business.
| Band | Published examples | What the money buys on a redesign |
|---|---|---|
| $59 to $79 a month, nothing upfront | The Free Tradie Website Crew at $79/month. Andrew Boddy at $59/month plus a Squarespace subscription. | A template restyled with your details and hosted for you. Ask what happens to the site, and to the domain, if you stop paying. |
| $250 to $1,500 upfront | Havealook and Cheap Websites at $995. Lime Virtual Studio from $250 to $1,500. | A small page count on an existing template. Your current text is normally moved across rather than rewritten. |
| $1,295 to $5,000 upfront | Katipo from $1,295. Design Mojo from $500 to $5,000. | Custom layout, more pages, some new writing. This is the band where the brief, not the provider, sets the number. |
| $5,600 to $7,500 upfront | Tradie Web Guys at $5,600. WebApex quoting $7,500 for trades and construction. | Industry specialists, structured for enquiries rather than for looks, generally with a monthly fee on top. |
| $3,000 to $10,000 upfront, then $500 to $2,000 a month | The common Australian agency shape. | Research, copywriting, a rebuilt page structure and continuing work after launch. The widest range, because scope varies most here. |
The spread is not margin. It is scope. What follows is the list of things that decide where inside it your project lands, roughly in order of how much they move the number.
Page count is the first multiplier, and the one worth arguing about
Nearly every quote is priced per page whether or not it says so, which is why a 6-page brief and a 24-page brief from the same provider can differ by a factor of 3. The trap is that page count feels generous when a proposal offers more of it, so buyers accept the larger number without asking who those pages are for.
Page count should be set by search demand, not by an internal structure chart. A page earns its place if people search for the thing it is about, and it is dead weight otherwise. When we audited this website in August 2026 we found 49 of its 90 addresses had never been shown in a Google result, not once. Every one of those had been paid for inside somebody's page count. We cut the site to 36 hand-written pages, and nothing measurable was lost with them.
Ask for the quote broken out per page, then delete the pages you cannot name a search for. That edit is usually worth more than any discount you could negotiate.
Rewritten or migrated: the largest hidden line
Migration means your existing words are poured into a new design. Rewriting means somebody researches what your customers type, decides which page answers which search, and writes accordingly. The visible result looks similar on launch day. The cost difference runs into thousands, and so does the outcome.
Migration also carries a specific risk on a redesign. If the reason you are replacing the site is that it never brought in work, moving the same text into a better-looking container reproduces the problem at a higher resolution. The pages that failed will keep failing, because what failed was not the layout.
The reverse mistake costs just as much. Rewriting a page that already earns clicks is an expensive way to find out it was working. Migrate what performs, rewrite what does not, and insist the quote says which pages fall into which pile.
A shop or an integration changes the category, not the tier
Products, variants, stock levels, a payment gateway, shipping rules, tax handling and a refund path are each a separate piece of work, and all of them need testing before anyone can take money through them. The same applies to integrations: a booking system, a quoting tool, a CRM, job management software, accounting software. Each connection gets scoped, built and tested on its own.
This is why a service business with 10 pages and an online store with 300 products are not the same job at 2 different sizes. Our own agreement puts e-commerce setup and third-party integrations beyond standard analytics outside what the monthly fee covers, which is the honest version of the same point. Every business in our gallery of live builds is a service business that sells enquiries, not carts.
Changing the URL structure carries a cost the quote rarely shows
Rankings attach to individual addresses, not to businesses. If the redesign renames or merges pages, every retired address needs mapping to its closest surviving replacement, and those redirects need to be live on launch day rather than added after somebody notices the traffic has gone.
That mapping is a distinct piece of work from the design, and on most quotes it is either absent or buried in a line called migration. When we retired 54 addresses from this site, the redirect map was built and checked separately from anything visual. Ask whether the quote includes a URL map and redirects, and if the answer is vague, assume it does not. The full mechanics are in how to redesign without losing your Google rankings.
"SEO included" needs 3 questions before it means anything
On a redesign quote that phrase covers everything from genuine research down to a sitemap file and some title tags. The 3 questions that separate them:
- Which searches is this site being built to match? You should get actual phrases with actual volumes, not a promise to optimise.
- Which page targets which search? If 2 pages target the same phrase they compete with each other, and Google indexes one and suppresses the other.
- What happens in the 90 days after launch? A new site is a starting position. Nobody serious will promise you a ranking or a date, and anyone who does is describing something they cannot control.
Results, when they come, belong to named businesses rather than to averages. Underpinning Sydney reached the top 3 for "underpinning Sydney". Adelaide's Bathroom Network began ranking inside 8 weeks. Those are specific sites in specific markets, which is the only way a ranking claim is worth reading.
What $0 upfront does to the risk on a second attempt
A redesign is rarely a first attempt. Somebody already paid for the site being replaced, usually in full and usually before it had proved anything. Paying upfront again means buying the same outcome twice before anyone knows whether the second version works any better than the first.
Ours is arranged the other way round. The build costs nothing, and the fee is $297 a month including GST across a 12-month subscription, which totals $3,564 over the year. The first invoice is raised only after the site is live and after tracking is verified. Build time is 5 working days from intake, and if we miss it you pay no monthly fee for the first 12 months. If your website has not produced a lead from SEO within the first 90 days of going live, you stop paying the monthly fee until it does. Billing resumes on the first lead. There is no refund of fees already paid, and we do not promise a ranking or a ranking timeframe, because nobody can.
That is the pitch, stated once. It belongs in an article about price because it changes the question you are answering. You stop deciding whether a redesign is worth several thousand dollars before you have evidence, and start deciding whether a working site is worth $297 a month once it is producing enquiries. We take 4 builds a month and 3 are open at the moment. Everything sits on the pricing page, including what is not covered.
Get these 6 things in writing before you accept a quote
- The page list, priced. Which pages exist, what each one is for, and what each adds to the total.
- Migrated or rewritten, page by page. Named against the list above, not described in general terms.
- The URL map and the redirects. Included, excluded, or quoted as an extra. All 3 answers are acceptable. Silence is not.
- Who holds the domain, the code and the analytics after launch, and what it takes to move to another provider.
- The cost of an edit. A phone number change, a new service, 6 photographs. Ask for the hourly rate and the turnaround.
- The 12-month total. Build price plus hosting plus licences plus support plus edits. That is the number to compare between quotes, and it is almost never the one on the front page of the proposal.
A provider who answers all 6 without hesitation is worth paying more than one who does not. The band your project lands in matters far less than whether the person quoting it can tell you exactly what you are buying.