Most redesign enquiries arrive with a number already attached to them. Someone has been quoted before, or has read a figure somewhere, and the conversation starts from there. We understand why, but it is the wrong end of the problem. A price only means something once both sides agree on what is being replaced and what is being kept.
So before we quote anything, we work through four things. None of it takes long, and it is the difference between a number that holds and a number that moves twice.
The site you have, not the site you describe
Every owner describes their website from memory, and memory is generous. Pages that were planned get described as if they exist. Sections that were added in a hurry get left out. The first thing we do is go through the site page by page and write down what is actually there — templates, post types, forms, integrations, anything running on a schedule.
This is also where most surprises live. A booking widget nobody mentioned. A second contact form pointing at an inbox that stopped being read. A plugin doing one small but load-bearing job.
Where the current site actually earns
A redesign that ignores the existing traffic is a gamble. Before touching layout we look at what the site is already doing well, using whatever data exists — analytics, Search Console, the enquiry inbox, the CRM.
- Which pages bring people in, and from where
- Which pages people actually convert on
- Which URLs have links pointing at them from elsewhere
- What people search for on the site itself
Those pages set constraints. They can be redesigned, but their URLs, their intent and their content need to carry across deliberately rather than by accident.
What has to survive the move
There is usually a short list of things that cannot break on launch day: the URLs people have bookmarked, the forms that feed a sales process, the tracking that finance reports from, the integrations that touch stock or bookings.
The expensive part of a redesign is rarely the design. It is everything quietly attached to the old site that nobody wrote down.
We write that list before quoting, because it is the part that determines how much careful work sits behind the visible pages.
Then, and only then, a number
With those three things on paper, the quote stops being a guess. We can say what is in scope, what we would rather handle in a later phase, and where the genuine unknowns are — because there are always one or two, and naming them up front is more useful than pretending otherwise.
If you are weighing up a redesign at the moment, those four questions are worth working through even if you never speak to us. They tend to change what you ask for.
