What a website redesign costs in India in 2026
A cosmetic refresh costs Rs. 1,20,000 to Rs. 3,00,000. A full rebuild on the same platform costs Rs. 3,00,000 to Rs. 8,00,000. A replatform onto a new stack starts near Rs. 8,00,000 and passes Rs. 20,00,000 once a large catalogue or heavy integration work is involved.
Based in Pune? The same work with local price bands is in website redesign cost in Pune.
Those bands assume an agency that writes a scope document, works on a staging environment, tests on real devices and hands you a repository at the end. Quotes far below them exist. What you usually get for Rs. 40,000 is a purchased theme with your logo dropped in, no redirect map and no content plan, and that is the redesign which quietly costs you six to twelve months of search traffic. That loss is a far bigger number than the invoice you saved.
The rest of this guide covers what moves the price, the line items that vanish from cheap quotes, how to phase the spend, and the cases where you should not redesign at all.
The word redesign hides three different projects
There is a 10x spread between the cheapest and the most expensive thing people call a redesign. Decide which one you are buying before you collect quotes, or you will end up comparing three proposals that solve three different problems.
Cosmetic refresh
Same platform, same page structure, same URLs, same content. You change typography, colour, spacing, imagery, the header and footer, and two or three important page layouts. Nothing in the database moves and no URL changes, so no redirects are required. It is the cheapest and by far the safest option, and for many businesses it is the correct one.
Full rebuild
Same platform, new information architecture. Pages are merged, split, renamed and rewritten, templates are built from scratch, and the navigation changes. This is where URLs change, and therefore where a redirect map stops being optional. Most projects described as a redesign are really this one.
Replatform
You are moving from Wix to WordPress, from a legacy custom PHP site to Laravel, or from an old ecommerce system to WooCommerce or Shopify. Content, users, orders, the payment gateway, transactional email and analytics all have to move. Here the cost is driven by data migration and integration rework, not by how the site looks.
| Type | What changes | Price band | Timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmetic refresh | Look only, URLs untouched | Rs. 1,20,000 to Rs. 3,00,000 | 3 to 5 weeks |
| Full rebuild | New structure, new templates, new URLs | Rs. 3,00,000 to Rs. 8,00,000 | 8 to 14 weeks |
| Replatform | New stack, data and integrations migrated | Rs. 8,00,000 to Rs. 20,00,000 | 12 to 24 weeks |
What actually drives the number
Design hours are rarely the largest line on a serious redesign. Four other things move the total far more.
Unique templates, not page count
A vendor quoting per page is guessing. What costs money is the number of distinct templates: home, service detail, blog list, blog post, case study, pricing, contact, careers, plus states like search results and the 404 page. A 200 page site built from nine templates is cheaper than a 25 page site where every page is bespoke. Count templates in your brief, then say how many pages sit under each.
Custom design versus a configured theme
A premium theme configured with your brand applied is Rs. 60,000 to Rs. 1,50,000 of the budget. Original design, with wireframes, two or three concept directions, a real type scale, a component library and mobile layouts drawn rather than guessed, is Rs. 1,50,000 to Rs. 4,00,000. Both are legitimate choices. The mistake is paying custom design prices and receiving a configured theme, so ask to see the design files before development starts.
Content, the line nobody budgets
Rewriting is the most underestimated cost in every redesign. Thirty pages of professionally rewritten copy is not a weekend job, and the person who understands the business well enough to write it is usually you or your sales head. If the vendor writes it, expect Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 5,000 per page. If you write it, block real calendar time, because unfinished content is why most redesigns slip by a month or more.
Catalogue, migration and integrations
Two hundred old blog posts do not move themselves, and neither do 4,000 SKUs with variants, tax classes and images. Scripted migration plus manual cleanup for a mid sized catalogue is commonly Rs. 60,000 to Rs. 2,50,000 on its own. Every integration you already depend on, the payment gateway, GST invoicing, a CRM, WhatsApp notifications, ERP stock sync, must be rebuilt and retested, and each is days of work rather than hours. Our ecommerce development cost guide covers the catalogue side properly.
The line items that disappear from cheap quotes
When two quotes differ by Rs. 2,00,000, the gap is usually not margin. It is everything below, dropped so the headline number looks competitive. Ask for each of these in writing.
| Forgotten line item | Typical cost | What it costs you if skipped |
|---|---|---|
| SEO migration and 301 redirect map | Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 90,000 | Rankings and backlinks lost at launch |
| Content re-entry and formatting | Rs. 300 to Rs. 800 per page | Launch delayed, staff doing data entry |
| Photography and licensed imagery | Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 1,00,000 | Stock photos that undo the new design |
| Staging environment and device QA | Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 75,000 | Bugs found by customers, not by testers |
| Analytics, tags and form tracking | Rs. 15,000 to Rs. 40,000 | No data to prove the redesign worked |
| Training, documentation, handover | Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 35,000 | Permanent dependence on the vendor |
If a proposal does not name SEO migration, staging, QA on real devices and a handover session, assume they are excluded and that you will pay for them later, in cash or in lost rankings.
Skipping the redirect map is the costliest mistake in a redesign
Understand the mechanism rather than taking this on trust. Every URL on your current site that ranks, earns links or sits in someone’s bookmark is an asset. When a rebuild changes those URLs and nothing maps the old address to the new one, every visitor and every crawler following an old link hits a 404. Search engines drop the old URL, the ranking it held is not transferred to the new page, and the links pointing at it stop passing value.
The fix costs almost nothing next to the damage. Before launch, export every URL from the CMS, the sitemap, Search Console and analytics, then map each one to its closest equivalent on the new site as a 301 permanent redirect. Pages with no equivalent go to the nearest relevant category page, not to the home page in bulk, because a mass redirect to the home page is treated as a soft 404.
Ask any vendor three questions: who builds the redirect map, when is it tested, and who watches 404 reports for thirty days after launch. A serious agency answers immediately. Recovery after a botched migration is slow, often months of technical cleanup and rewriting, and nobody can promise the rankings come back.
Realistic timelines
A refresh takes three to five weeks. A rebuild takes eight to fourteen weeks. A replatform takes twelve to twenty four weeks. Those assume your side replies within two working days, because client review time, not development time, decides the launch date.
Broken down, a rebuild is roughly: discovery and sitemap one to two weeks, design two to four weeks including your revision rounds, development three to six weeks, content entry and migration one to three weeks in parallel, then QA, redirect testing and launch one to two weeks. Anyone promising a full rebuild in three weeks is planning to skip QA and the redirect map.
GST, milestones and what actually leaves your bank
Web design and development is taxed at 18 percent GST. A Rs. 5,00,000 project is a Rs. 5,90,000 invoice. If your business is GST registered and the site is used for business, that 18 percent is normally available as input tax credit, so your effective cost is the base figure, but only if the vendor is registered and issues a proper tax invoice with GSTIN and the correct SAC code. An unregistered vendor quoting lower is not cheaper once the credit is gone. Details are in our GST on website development guide.
A fair payment split is 30 to 40 percent to start, 30 percent at design sign off, 20 to 30 percent at staging approval, and the last 10 percent after launch plus a warranty window. Refuse full advance, and never release the final instalment before handover is complete. Budget separately for what runs after launch: hosting, SSL, licences, backups and monthly support, typically Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 1,50,000 a year, which our website maintenance cost guide sets out.
How to phase a redesign so cash flow works
You do not have to fund a Rs. 6,00,000 project in one quarter. Phasing also cuts risk, because each phase puts something live and measurable before you commit the next tranche.
Phase one is the templates that earn money: home, the top three service or product pages, and the enquiry flow. That is usually most of your traffic and nearly all of your leads, for 35 to 45 percent of the budget. Phase two is the supporting set: about, team, case studies, careers and the blog templates. Phase three is the extras, a client portal, booking, multilingual pages, deeper analytics.
Two conditions make phasing work. Decide the full information architecture and the redirect map in phase one even if later phases are built months afterwards, because URL structure decided piecemeal recreates the mess you are escaping. And agree the rate card for later phases in the first contract, so phase three is not repriced once the vendor knows you are committed.
Get a redesign quote with the redirect map included
Send us your current site and we will tell you whether you need a refresh, a rebuild or a replatform, with a line item budget and a timeline. No obligation, and an honest answer if a smaller fix would serve you better.
Who owns the code, the repository and everything else
This is the clause that separates a professional engagement from a hostage situation, and it costs nothing to get right at the start.
Put in writing that on final payment all custom code, design files and content are your property. You should receive the Git repository or a full export, the domain registrar login in your company’s name, hosting and DNS access, the CMS administrator account, the database, design source files, and a list of every third party licence and API key with who pays for it. Ask for a short handover document and a recorded training session so the next person to touch the site does not start from zero.
Check two things before signing. The domain must be registered to your company, not the agency, because a domain held by a vendor you have fallen out with is the worst position in this business. And anything built on an agency’s proprietary CMS is not portable, so price the exit before you enter. If leaving is expensive, that is a real project cost even though it never appears on an invoice.
When you should not redesign at all
Plenty of businesses redesign because the site feels dated, then wonder why nothing changed. Looks are rarely the constraint.
The Rs. 30,000 fix that beats a Rs. 3,00,000 redesign
If the site takes six seconds to load on mobile data, then image compression, caching, removing three unused tracking scripts and better hosting is a Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 50,000 job that will outperform any redesign. If people arrive and leave, the headline and the offer are wrong, and rewriting the top five pages is Rs. 30,000 to Rs. 75,000. If nobody arrives at all, you have a visibility problem, and a beautiful new site with the same thin content will rank exactly as badly. If the enquiry form has nine fields, cut it to three and watch what happens before you spend a lakh.
Run this test first. Open analytics, find how many people reach the site and how many take the action you want. Good traffic with poor conversion means fix the pages. Poor traffic means fix content and technical SEO. Redesign when the platform genuinely blocks you, when the brand has actually changed, when the site is unusable on a phone, or when the code is too old to maintain safely. Those are real reasons. Looking dated, on its own, is not a Rs. 3,00,000 reason.
How to compare three quotes without being fooled
Put the proposals side by side and look for the same nine things: number of unique templates, who writes the content, whether a redirect map is included, how many design revision rounds you get, the price of a change request after sign off, the QA device list, the warranty period, the support response times, and the ownership clause. A proposal missing four of those is not a proposal, it is a price.
Then ask the question that reveals the most: what happens if we disagree about whether something was in scope? The good answer involves a written scope document, a change request form and a rate agreed upfront. The bad answer is a reassurance. Ask for two references from projects that launched over a year ago, because anyone looks good in month one. For like for like new build numbers, our website development cost in India guide uses the same bands.
Our team is based in Pune and works with clients across India. The fastest way to get a real number is to send your current site URL, a rough page count, and what is actually not working.
Also read: compare the numbers in our website development cost in India guide, plan the running spend with website maintenance cost in India, and if the redesign is really a software project, read custom web application development cost in India.
