Website Redesign Cost Breakdown: Unveiling the Hidden Expenses
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More chaptersA website serves as an essential platform for businesses to showcase their offerings and reinforce their brand identity. When there is a need to learn about a new service, today’s customers prefer the static content on the business website before making purchasing decisions instead of directly contacting third-party vendors.
To promote business activities and attract potential customers, an increasing number of large and small businesses are investing in developing their own websites. A website is considered successful if it has a friendly user interface, fast load speed, valuable content, and other factors. However, the emergence of hundreds of new websites every day has contributed to the high level of tension in the web market, leaving many businesses wondering how to stand out from the crowd and refresh their websites. Many project owners choose to build a new custom website despite the cost burden; some prefer to be involved in a website redesign project, which is a better idea to take advantage of existing platforms.
However, the question is, “Do you really need website redesigns?”, “What are the factors that affect website redesign costs?”, and “How much does it cost to redesign a website?”. That is where this article helps you out.
Perfect Timing to Redesign a Website
There are dozens of reasons why business owners decide to embark on website redesign projects. If you are experiencing almost all of these problems below, get ready for a site redesign as soon as possible.
When Your Website Performance is Slow
The page load speed of any website is an important factor in retaining visitors. Studies show that if a website takes more than a few seconds to load, customers tend to lose patience and leave the site immediately. Imagine a customer who is interested in the products and services you offer. They visit your website with the intention of purchasing products or submitting a form. However, slow loading time is the issue holding them back. This long-lasting situation drives customer psychology from enthusiastic to frustrated, leading to the loss of a large number of potential customers.
Furthermore, page loading speed is also a vital ranking criterion for search engines like Google. Sites with low data processing speeds may receive a lower ranking in search results and reduced organic traffic.
When Your Web Design is Outdated
Visual perception is one of the first factors that attract customers when visiting your website. You may provide excellent products and services. However, an outdated website can make you appear unprofessional and hinder user engagement.
Design trends change as time goes by. While the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” holds true, customers may assume negatively about the product’s quality if a business sticks to outdated designs and ignores modern design standards and aesthetics.
When Your Website Content is Poor
How long has it been since you last updated the content on your own website? Similar to design, content also has certain trends that gain traction and resonate with audiences at a given time. For example, there was a time when long-form content had shifted towards short content when it provided more comprehensive information and detailed insights. To capture the trends of readers and visitors, businesses in any field align their website content strategy accordingly. Failure to follow the industry trends causes businesses to lose many opportunities to develop and expand projects.
In addition, some of the following errors are also counted as poor content, such as thin or shallow content that is uninformative, irrelevant information that is no longer useful, poor grammar and spelling, overuse of keywords, etc. Content, in this case, is no longer a tool to increase organic traffic for your website.
When You Change Your Project Goals and Requirements
Your project goals and requirements may change over time based on various factors and circumstances. The involved market landscape may drive new market trends and customer behavior. Business internal and external factors may contribute to the restructuring and alterations in resources. Rapid technological advancements may open up new innovations. Regular performance evaluations like ROI software may reveal gaps and areas needing adjustment.
All of the above reasons require businesses to be prepared and quickly adapt to changing environmental conditions. And it is when your redesigned website comes in. The business’s job is to change the old content on the website so that the visual presence can promote its proper use, which is to reflect the true nature of the product and service.
Redesign Process: How to Improve Your Existing Website?
Depending on the needs of the business at a certain time, the website redesign price and the development type will be different. Regardless of the genre, businesses should know that this will be a very complicated journey, and every wrong decision along the way costs money and time.
Redecoration
This is the process of changing or updating the visual and design aesthetic properties of a website while keeping the existing structure intact. The cost to redesign the visual appearance often comes with a low price due to the minor scope of work. Redecoration only focuses on changing and improving color schemes, graphics, typography, or even overall styling, which gives your website redesign project a fresh and modern look without altering functionalities.
Rewiring
Rewiring refers to a more extensive redesign process, including updating and improving the website’s performance, security, speed, and different device compatibility. With the use of the latest technology, the rewiring process may help businesses enhance the website’s functionality and user experience. Website cost redesign at this stage stems from UX design services, additional plugins, and the work of the development team.
Remodeling
Remodeling is a combination of revamping both visual and structural changes. This process may include restructuring the information architecture, simplifying complex features, improving accessibility, and redesigning key pages or templates to align with user needs and business goals. Remodeling results in higher costs but significantly offers more business value after completion.
Rebuilding
If the business needs to redesign the website from scratch, it is recommended to invest in the rebuilding process. Based on the elements available in the existing website, the web developer team worked together to rebirth your website to a completely new look and structure, leading to better customer engagement and lead generation. It may involve extensive planning, prototyping, and development to create a website that aligns with the latest industry standards and business objectives.
Factors that Impact Website Redesign Pricing
Redesigning a website can be a complex, multi-step process with many factors that affect the cost. This section is designed to assist you in identifying unexpected expenses that may be concealed.
Redesign Scope and Complexity
What does it mean by “redesign scope”? Redesign scope refers to the website redesign types listed above, including redecoration, rewiring, remodeling, and rebuilding. Depending on the need to refurbish the existing website, the corresponding cost of website redesign will be different. If the business only requires a simple visual refresh and redecoration, the estimated cost will be minimal, even for startups.
In contrast, the corresponding costs will be quite high for enterprises with higher requirements for the new complicated websites, such as restructuring the entire software product, implementing new functionalities, or integrating complex systems. The reason for the increasing website redesign costs depends on the technologies used and the level of time, effort, and technical expertise.
Business Customization
The website redesign process is typically determined by achieving the agreed-upon goals and meeting the project scope. However, in case the business has additional requirements related to website customization, the cost of website redesign will also change more or less.
Each redesign service provides customers with different revamp packages. In general, the following requirements count as additional ones and will add additional costs during the redesign process.
- Creating unique typography, custom graphics, and tailored visual elements to reflect the brand identity.
- Customizing Content Management System (CMS) interface and specific content types or templates for websites.
- Integrating with existing business systems like payment gateways and inventory management systems.
- Adapting websites for different regions by translating existing content, implementing language switchers, and adjusting the design.
- Supporting technical tasks like ongoing website maintenance and security updates.
- Tracking website’s performance through analytics programs like Google Analytics or Adobe SiteCatalyst.
The advanced works above add complexity, time, and effort to the redesign project, leading to higher website redesign costs.
Number of Web Pages
How many pages does your website have? Although it may appear unrelated, this question is actually relevant. The total number of web pages will be redesigned, heavily affecting website redesign pricing since each page may require customization and individual attention. Redesigning a small website with a few pages will generally be less expensive than redesigning a large website with numerous pages. In other words, the fewer pages, the more businesses are likely to save money.
However, the number of pages does not really reflect the redesign costs in some exceptional cases. For example, a business that needs to restructure only one homepage and integrate it with an existing banking app will have a higher website redesign cost compared to one that changes the overall design of two to three web pages.
Timeline and Urgency
Timeline and urgency are factors that affect the redesign cost in case you outsource. Not only partnering with your company, a web design agency can work with many other clients simultaneously. If you go to redesign services with tight deadlines or expedited delivery requirements, the cost to redesign may incur additional charges whether you want to or not.
Urgent website redesign projects require the development team to conduct prioritized scheduling, which could result in rearranging or postponing other tasks or projects, negatively impacting service providers’ previous commitments to other customers. The web design agency can clearly allocate more developers, designers, or project managers to ensure timely website completion. However, dealing with developer shortages and recruitment costs takes work. Existing web designers have no choice but to work longer hours or outside their regular working schedule. All of the above factors significantly affect the total cost of a website redesign.
How to Minimize the Business Website Redesign Costs
Utilize ready-made templates: Instead of starting everything from scratch, why not try using the pre-designed templates that pop up all over the internet and then customize them to your own needs? This method saves time and money, but it does not effectively increase brand recognition.
Reduce the scope: Copying all the content from the old site to a redesign project is not always a smart choice, as this adds complexity to the new website. Instead, it is advisable to remove unnecessary sections of content or even entire pages to reduce the cost of a website redesign.
Build fewer web pages: The process of redesigning a website can become lengthy when dealing with an excessive number of web pages. To save costs, businesses should assess each web page of necessity and consider consolidating or combining pages where possible.
Keep the content simple: The website is undeniably a place to provide information about products and services. However, unconcise content can backfire and cause many negative effects, such as higher bounce rate, extra design and development efforts, which increase website redesign costs.
Connect with outsourcing companies: Redesigning on your own can save money in terms of design and development costs. However, it requires technical skills, time, hiring, tools, and technology investment. Using outsourcing services helps businesses eliminate all of the above pitfalls and shorten time to market.
As technology and consumer habits evolve, businesses must accept that their website is never truly complete. Even if you have delivered the best version at the time, your website can become outdated a few years later in the eyes of visitors. It’s important to keep your website updated and monitored to maintain connections with loyal customers and attract potential ones.
If you need help from experts and focus on core competencies, look no further but Orient Software with our UI/UX service. Depending on your very specific needs, we will provide the right dedicated team and breathe new life into your online presence. Contact us here.