"Our website needs updating" hides three very different projects with three very different price tags. Buying the wrong one wastes money in both directions: a $3k refresh on a structurally broken site is lipstick, and a $12k rebuild of a site that just needed new photos is demolition for the sake of it. Here's how to tell which project you actually have.
The three projects and their 2026 prices
Refresh: $2,000-$5,000. The bones are fine: platform is modern, structure makes sense, it just looks dated. New design skin, new photography, tightened copy, speed tune-up. Two to three weeks. The right call more often than the industry admits.
Rebuild: $4,000-$12,000. New site on a modern platform, keeping (and improving) your content and structure. The default when the site is 5+ years old, slow on mobile, or built on something nobody wants to maintain. Three to six weeks.
Replatform: $6,000-$20,000. A rebuild plus a system change: out of a dying page builder, off a proprietary "website rental", or from brochure site to ecommerce. The extra cost is data migration and redirect engineering, and it's worth every dollar when done right.
How to diagnose which one you need
Run three checks. Speed: if your site takes over three seconds on a phone, that's rarely fixable with a skin; lean rebuild. Editability: if changing your own prices requires paying someone, the platform is the problem; rebuild or replatform. Traffic: if Google Search Console shows real rankings and traffic, protect them at all costs, which changes how any project must be run (see below). If the site is fast, editable and just ugly, congratulations: you need the cheap project.
The most expensive sentence in redesigns is "we'll just start fresh." Your old site's URLs and rankings are an asset, often worth more than the design. A redesign that ignores them is a controlled demolition of your own traffic.
The SEO migration step that protects your rankings
Any rebuild must include: a crawl of every existing URL, 301 redirects from every old URL to its new equivalent, preserved (or improved) page titles and content for the pages that rank, and a Search Console check in the weeks after launch. This is 4-8 hours of disciplined work. Skipping it is how businesses lose ten years of Google equity in a weekend, and it's the first thing to verify in any redesign quote. If the quote doesn't mention redirects, the price is fiction.
Keep, kill or improve: the content decision
Old sites accumulate pages, and redesigns are the moment to triage: keep and improve what ranks or converts, merge the thin stuff, kill the dead weight with proper redirects. A good developer will run this triage with data (Search Console and analytics) rather than taste. It's also where a redesign quietly becomes an SEO upgrade for the same budget.
The bottom line
Diagnose before you buy: refresh at $2k-$5k, rebuild at $4k-$12k, replatform at $6k-$20k, and redirect engineering in writing whichever path you take. Not sure which project your site needs? Describe it in two minutes and three vetted Australian developers will each tell you, with a price attached, inside 24 hours. Their diagnosis consensus is free and genuinely useful.