How Much Does a Website Redesign Cost in Canada? (2026)

What a Website Redesign Actually Costs in Canada

Ask five Canadian providers to quote the same redesign and you’ll get five numbers that can differ by a factor of ten. That’s not dishonesty — it’s because “website redesign” describes everything from reskinning a template to rebuilding an e-commerce platform from scratch. Before you can compare quotes, you need to know which tier of project you’re actually buying.

Here are the typical Canadian price bands. A DIY builder like Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify’s starter tier runs $0–$50 per month in fees — plus a very real cost in your own time, usually measured in evenings and weekends for several months. A solo freelancer typically charges $2,000–$10,000 for a small-business redesign, depending on experience and how much of the design is custom. An agency-built small-business site generally lands between $5,000 and $25,000; within that band, a basic WordPress redesign in Canada usually costs $5,000–$15,000. Custom builds — a Next.js site, a headless CMS architecture, or anything with bespoke functionality — typically range from $15,000 to $50,000 and beyond. Complex projects like large e-commerce stores, membership platforms, or multi-language corporate sites routinely run $25,000–$100,000+.

These are ranges, not rules. A freelancer with a strong portfolio can out-price a junior agency team, and an agency can quote below a senior freelancer if your project fits a system they’ve built many times. The bands exist to tell you whether a quote is in the normal universe for the kind of work you’re asking for — and to flag when someone is quoting a template job at custom-build prices.

The Six Things That Actually Drive Your Quote

When a provider scopes a redesign, six variables move the number more than anything else.

Page count is the most obvious. A five-page brochure site and a forty-page site with service pages, location pages, and a blog archive are different projects, even if they look similar in a portfolio. Most providers price in tiers: a base for the core templates, then a per-page or per-template rate beyond that.

Custom design versus template is the next fork. Adapting a purchased theme is fast and cheap; designing every page from a blank canvas means a designer, revision rounds, and developer time translating mockups into code. Custom design alone can add 30–50% to a project.

The CMS decision matters more than most owners realize. Staying on WordPress with a familiar theme structure is the cheap path. Moving to a new CMS — or to a headless setup where the content system and the front end are separate — adds architecture work, but often pays for itself in speed and maintainability.

Integrations are the quiet budget-eater. Booking systems, CRMs, payment processors, inventory feeds, member logins — each one is scoping, development, and testing time. A site that “just needs to connect to our booking software” can double in cost if that software has a poor API.

Content production is frequently excluded from quotes entirely, which is how two bids for the “same” project end up $8,000 apart. If the provider is writing your copy and sourcing your imagery, the quote reflects it. If they’re not, that work lands back on you.

Finally, migrations: moving hundreds of blog posts, product listings, or customer records from an old platform is tedious, error-prone work that has to be done carefully. Large migrations can be a five-figure line item on their own.

The Costs Everyone Forgets to Budget For

The sticker price of a redesign is rarely the whole price. Five categories reliably surprise business owners after the contract is signed.

Copywriting is the big one. Most redesign quotes assume you will supply final copy, and most businesses can’t — writing clear, persuasive web copy is a skill, and your team is busy running the business. Professional web copywriting in Canada typically runs $100–$300 per page, and a redesign without rewritten copy is usually just an expensive reskin of the same weak message.

Photography and visuals come next. Stock photos make a new site look like everyone else’s. A half-day brand shoot for a local business often costs $500–$2,000 and does more for credibility than most design flourishes.

SEO migration work is the most dangerous omission, because skipping it doesn’t cost money up front — it costs traffic afterward. Mapping old URLs to new ones, setting up redirects, and preserving the content that earns your rankings is real labour, and many redesign quotes simply don’t include it.

Maintenance is the cost that never shows up in the proposal but arrives every year after launch: plugin and security updates, backups, uptime monitoring, small content changes, and the occasional emergency fix. Budget $50–$300 per month for a typical small-business site, more for e-commerce.

Hosting rounds out the list. Managed hosting appropriate for a business site runs roughly $20–$100+ per month, and the cheapest shared hosting is usually a false economy — slow servers undermine the speed gains you just paid for.

One-Time Project vs. Subscription: Two Ways to Pay

Most redesigns are sold as one-time projects: you pay a fixed fee (often 50% up front, 50% at launch), you own the site, and ongoing maintenance is either a separate retainer or your problem. The advantage is clarity — a defined scope, a defined price, a defined end. The disadvantage is what happens after launch: sites decay without attention, and the “finished” project quietly accumulates outdated content, broken plugins, and slowing performance until someone proposes the next redesign three years later.

The alternative is a subscription or retainer model, where the build cost is rolled into a monthly fee that also covers hosting, maintenance, and usually some level of ongoing marketing work. Several Canadian providers work this way; SearchPod’s flat plans, for instance, start at $1,000 per month CAD and include the website build and maintenance inside the plan rather than as a separate project fee. The advantage is no five-figure upfront hit and a site that’s continuously maintained and improved. The trade-off is commitment: you’re paying monthly, so the model only makes sense if you actually want ongoing marketing work, not just a website.

Neither model is universally better. If you have internal marketing capacity and just need a build, a one-time project with a light maintenance retainer is the cleaner buy. If the redesign is one piece of a larger growth effort — SEO, ads, landing pages — a subscription model often costs less over two or three years than a project fee plus a separate agency retainer. Run the math both ways over a 24–36 month horizon before deciding; the upfront number is the least useful figure for comparing them.

Don’t Let the Redesign Destroy Your SEO

This deserves its own section because it’s the most expensive mistake in the entire redesign process, and it’s invisible until weeks after launch. A redesign that ignores SEO can wipe out years of accumulated rankings overnight — and businesses routinely lose a large share of their organic traffic this way, then spend months clawing it back.

Three pieces of work prevent it. First, URL mapping: before anything launches, someone needs a complete inventory of every URL on the old site and a decision about where each one goes on the new site. The pages quietly bringing in traffic are often not the ones anyone remembers building.

Second, 301 redirects: every old URL that changes must permanently redirect to its new equivalent. This is how Google transfers the authority your old pages earned to the new ones. Miss the redirects and that authority simply evaporates — along with the links other sites have pointed at you for years.

Third, content parity: if a page ranks because of its content, and the redesign trims that content down to look cleaner, the ranking goes with it. Redesigns love to cut copy; Google notices when the substance disappears.

When you’re comparing quotes, ask each provider directly how they handle URL mapping and redirects, and whether they benchmark organic traffic before launch. A provider who shrugs at the question is telling you exactly what your rankings are worth to them. If your traffic is a meaningful source of leads, this work belongs in the contract, not in the goodwill.

How to Write a Brief That Gets Comparable Quotes

The reason redesign quotes vary wildly isn’t just provider pricing — it’s that vague briefs force every provider to guess at scope, and they all guess differently. A one-page brief fixes most of this.

State the business goal first, in one sentence: more lead-form submissions, more online orders, a credibility upgrade before a funding round. Providers scope differently for “generate leads” than for “look more professional,” and they should.

Then pin down the variables from the quote-drivers section. List your current page count and roughly how many pages the new site needs. Say whether you expect custom design or are happy adapting a quality template. Name your current CMS and whether you’re open to changing it. List every integration by name — your CRM, booking tool, payment processor, email platform. State who is writing the copy and supplying photography. Note what needs migrating: how many blog posts, products, or records.

Add two more lines that providers rarely get but always appreciate: your budget range and your deadline. Owners often withhold budget to avoid “anchoring” the quote, but in practice it just produces proposals scoped for the wrong tier. Saying “we have $10,000–$15,000” gets you proposals that maximize that budget instead of three bids you can’t compare.

Send the same brief to every provider and require itemized quotes against it. When the numbers come back, differences will be explainable — one includes copywriting, one assumes a template — instead of mysterious. That’s the whole game: you’re not looking for the lowest number, you’re looking for the best-scoped one.

The ROI Math: When a Redesign Pays for Itself

A redesign is an investment claim: spend money now, earn more later. So treat it like one and run the numbers before you sign anything.

The core math is simple. Take your monthly website traffic, your current conversion rate (visitors who become leads or customers), and your average revenue per lead or order. Suppose your site gets 3,000 visits a month, converts at 1%, and a lead is worth $500 in expected revenue. That’s 30 leads and $15,000 a month. If a well-executed redesign lifts conversion from 1% to 1.5% — a realistic outcome when the current site is slow, confusing, or dated — that’s 15 additional leads and $7,500 in additional monthly revenue. A $20,000 redesign pays for itself in under three months on those numbers.

Now run the same math with your real figures, and be honest about the conversion lift. If your current site already converts well, a redesign might buy you very little, and the money belongs in traffic or offer improvements instead. If you don’t know your conversion rate at all, that’s the first problem to fix — set up the measurement before the redesign, or you’ll never know whether it worked.

This math also tells you what to prioritize in the project itself. Speed, clarity of the offer, trust signals, and friction-free contact paths move conversion rates. Subtle animations and a more fashionable colour palette mostly don’t. When budget pressure forces cuts, cut the things that don’t show up in the equation.

Red Flags to Watch For in Redesign Proposals

Most bad redesign outcomes are visible in the proposal, if you know where to look.

No mention of redirects or SEO migration is the biggest one, for the reasons covered above. If your site has any organic traffic and the proposal doesn’t address preserving it, either it wasn’t considered or it’s a future change order.

A single round number with no itemization — “$12,000 for a new website” — means you can’t see what’s included, which means you’ll find out at the worst possible time. Insist on a breakdown: design, development, content, migration, testing, launch.

No discovery phase is another tell. A provider willing to quote a firm price before understanding your business, your customers, and your current site’s data is quoting a template process, whatever the proposal says about “custom.”

Watch for ownership and lock-in terms: proposals where the provider retains ownership of the site, builds on a proprietary platform you can’t leave, or keeps the hosting and domain registration in their name. You should own your domain, your content, and your site — or, in a subscription model, the exit terms should be written down plainly.

Be wary of timelines that are either absurdly short (a quality custom redesign in two weeks) or completely open-ended, and of proposals that never mention who writes the copy. And finally, no post-launch plan: a proposal that ends at launch day, with no mention of maintenance, measurement, or a 30-day fix window, is selling you a delivery, not a result.

The Bottom Line

For a typical Canadian small business, a competent redesign costs $5,000–$25,000 as a one-time project, with basic WordPress work at the low end and custom builds running $15,000–$50,000+. Subscription models spread that cost into a monthly fee — often $1,000–$3,000 per month with maintenance and marketing work included — and which model wins depends entirely on whether you want a website or an ongoing growth program.

Whatever the model, the same three moves protect your money: write a specific brief so quotes are comparable, insist that SEO migration is in the contract, and run the conversion math so you know what success looks like before you spend a dollar chasing it. A redesign that’s scoped properly, priced transparently, and measured honestly is one of the better investments a business can make. One that’s bought on aesthetics and a round number usually isn’t.