Is it a redesign or just a refresh?
Before spending anything, work out which one you actually need. A small business website redesign is warranted when the problem is structural. A refresh is enough when the problem is cosmetic.
It is a refresh if the site is fundamentally sound and you mostly want new photos, updated copy, and a fresher look. It is a rebuild if you recognise three or more of these:
- It is slow, and staying slow no matter what gets tried (that is often a hosting or build problem, not a design one)
- It is awkward on a phone — pinching to read, buttons that miss
- You are afraid to edit it, so it quietly goes stale
- Nobody can find anything, including you
- The person who built it is unreachable, and nobody knows how it works
- You would rather not send the link to a customer
That last one is the honest test. If you hesitate before giving out your own web address, the problem is not the colour scheme.
What actually moves when you rebuild
This is the part people worry about, usually without knowing exactly what they are worried about. Here is the real inventory.
| What | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| Your content | Moves across, usually rewritten and trimmed as it goes |
| Your URLs | Kept where sensible; redirected where they change |
| Your Google rankings | Follow the redirects — preserved if migration is done properly |
| Your images | Move, and get resized properly on the way |
| Forms and enquiries | Rebuilt and re-tested, usually improved |
| Your domain | Stays exactly as it is |
| Your email | Untouched — it is separate from your website |
| Old plugins | Mostly do not come, and are not missed |
Two things on that list surprise people. Your email is not affected — business email runs on separate infrastructure from your website, so rebuilding one does not disturb the other. And most plugins do not make the trip, because a custom build does natively what a stack of plugins was bolted on to fake.
Why nothing should break on launch day
Here is the single most important thing in a migration, and the thing cheap rebuilds skip: redirects.
Google does not attach your rankings to your business. It attaches them to specific addresses. If yoursite.com/services/gutter-cleaning has spent four years earning its place in the results and the new site calls that page /what-we-do/gutters, the old address now leads nowhere. Google finds a dead end, your visitors find an error page, and four years of standing quietly evaporates.
The fix is neither exotic nor expensive: every old address gets a redirect pointing at its closest new equivalent, so anyone — person or search engine — arriving at the old link lands on the right page. Done properly you keep the rankings, with a brief wobble for a week or two while Google re-crawls and reconciles the new structure.
So when you are comparing quotes, ask one question: "How are you handling redirects from the old URLs?" A confident, specific answer is a good sign. A blank look is a very useful thing to discover before you have paid.
not sure which one you need?
Describe your current site — how old it is, what platform, what bugs you about it — and the chat will give you a straight read on whether you are looking at a refresh or a rebuild, and a rough range for each.
How long it takes
Most agencies quote six to twelve weeks for a small business site, and for a large redesign with a lot of pages that is genuinely fair. Ours typically run three to four weeks, because we scope tightly, write the copy with you as we go rather than waiting for it, and do not run a design-by-committee revision cycle.
But here is the honest part, and it is true at every agency: the schedule almost never slips on the building. It slips on content and decisions. The single biggest cause of a late website is waiting on copy, photos, and approvals from the client's side — which is entirely fixable, and worth knowing before you start rather than after.
If you can turn feedback around in a couple of days and you have your photos ready, a small site moves fast. If approvals take three weeks each round, no agency on earth can hold the timeline.
What it costs
Straight ranges, because vagueness here helps nobody:
- A refresh — new photos, copy updates, a visual tidy on a sound site — is a small, well-defined job, usually a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars.
- A rebuild starts around $4,500 for a small business site and moves up with page count, custom functionality, and anything that has to talk to another system.
- Ongoing is the part people forget to ask about. A site needs hosting and someone minding it. Ours starts at $79/month; whoever you hire, get this number before you sign, not after.
The thing worth weighing is not the sticker price but the three-year cost. A cheap site you cannot edit, that loses you customers on mobile, and that needs paid help for every small change is not cheap. It is financed.
Your part of the deal: the fastest projects we run are the ones where the client blocks out two hours in week one to answer questions properly, and gets photos and feedback back within a couple of days. That is genuinely the whole trick. You do not need to know anything technical — you just need to be reachable.
What to ask before you sign
Five questions that separate a real proposal from a cheap one:
- How are you handling redirects from my old URLs? (The migration question. Non-negotiable.)
- Who owns the site when it is done? The answer should be you, plainly, with no hostage-taking over the code or the domain.
- Can I edit it myself, and what exactly can I change? Get specific. "Yes, with training" and "yes, anything" are different answers.
- What is the ongoing monthly cost, all in? Hosting, care, and anything licensed.
- What happens if I need something in six months? Find out the hourly rate and the response time now.
If you get straight answers to those five, you are probably in good hands regardless of who you hire. If the answers are vague, that vagueness is the product.
When you are ready to talk specifics, our website design service page lays out how we scope and price this, and the chat will give you a real range in a couple of minutes.
Written at the workbench in Cumberland, RI
