What actually moves the price
Design hours are rarely the biggest line. These five are, roughly in order.
- How many pages there are, and whether the content is being rewritten or moved. Moving is cheap; rewriting 200 product descriptions is not.
- Whether the URLs change. If they do, someone has to map every old one to a new one and write the redirects — and if nobody does, the traffic goes.
- Bespoke functionality: booking, quoting, portals, trade pricing. Anything the platform does not do out of the box is hours.
- Whether it is a catalogue. A 4,000-product shop and a six-page brochure are not versions of the same job.
- How ready you are. The most common cause of an overrunning project is not development — it is waiting for content and photographs.
Note what is not on that list: how good it looks. A beautiful site and an ordinary one take similar amounts of time to build once the design is settled, which is why “make it nicer” is not, on its own, a specification anybody can price.
Published prices, so you have something to compare against
Most studios do not publish, which makes any quote hard to judge. These are ours, and they are real starting points rather than headline numbers designed to get a phone call.
| What | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Website build or redesign | From £500 | A focused business site, rebuilt properly, redirects included |
| Hosting and care | £50 a month | Hosting, SSL, updates, backups, monitoring and small fixes |
| Large e-commerce or custom | On application, from hours | Big catalogues and bespoke functionality are scoped before they are quoted |
| Growth work afterwards | From £250 a month | Optional. A block of hours, not a percentage of anything |
Source: Cybrial’s own published pricing, correct at September 2026. Nothing is built from a bought theme.
The thing to test any quote against is not the number but what is inside it. Ask specifically whether the redirect map is included, whether the content is being migrated or rewritten, and what happens to hosting. Those three answers explain most of the difference between a £500 quote and a £5,000 one.
The half of the job nobody quotes for
A redesign loses traffic because the URLs changed and nobody wrote the redirects. Every link Google had, and every link anybody else had, now points at a page that does not exist. Google drops those pages over the following weeks and the fall looks like an algorithm update rather than the self-inflicted wound it is.
The second cause is quieter: content cut for looking dated. A long, slightly ugly page that answers a question thoroughly is very often the page earning the traffic. Replacing it with three lines and a photograph is a design improvement and a commercial loss in the same afternoon.
Neither is difficult to prevent. Crawl the existing site first, list every URL with the traffic and links it earns, map each to its new equivalent, and 301 the lot. Where there is no equivalent, a person makes a decision — not a catch-all redirect to the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404 and which helps nobody.
It is worth knowing this works at scale rather than in theory. On Beds.ie, a rebuild that kept and reorganised a large catalogue took organic clicks from 672 in April 2026 to 7,781 in August, with impressions from 38,608 to 282,069 — Search Console figures, full calendar months. A redesign that loses its rankings does not produce that shape.
Can I redesign it myself, or get AI to do it?
You can, and for a very small brochure site a builder will get you something presentable in a weekend. The two things that catch people out are the same as always: the redirects, and the moment you need the site to do something the builder does not do.
On AI specifically — the tools will now produce a plausible page from a description, and they are genuinely useful for a first draft or for getting unstuck on layout. What they do not do is know which of your existing pages earns the traffic, what your customers ring up and ask, or what happens to your rankings when the URLs move. Those are the parts that decide whether a redesign makes money, and they are judgement rather than generation.
The honest summary: AI has made producing a website much cheaper and has not made deciding what the website should be any cheaper at all.
When not to redesign at all
If the site converts, ranks and loads quickly and the only complaint is that it looks a bit dated, a redesign is an expensive way to buy a feeling. The same money spent on the checkout, the enquiry form or the three pages that already get traffic will usually return more.
The test is whether you can name what the redesign should change. “More enquiries” is a target and can be measured. “Fresher” is not, and cannot. If the answer is the second, it is worth a conversation before it is worth a quote — and sometimes the right outcome of that conversation is that you keep the site and fix two pages.
