Web DesignPricing

Website Redesign vs Rebuild: What Each Costs in New Zealand

Kage Works12 August 20268 min read

Two agencies look at the same tired website. One quotes $9,000, the other quotes $28,000. Both are describing honest work, and neither proposal explains the gap, because both of them use the word "redesign".

The gap comes from how much of the site each agency replaces, plus one decision made in the middle of either project that changes your risk more than your bill.

Four layers, and you pay for the ones you change

A small business website stacks four things you can replace on their own:

Content: your words, prices, photos, service descriptions.
Presentation: templates, CSS, layout, the part a visitor looks at.
Platform and data model: the CMS, the database, the plugins, the integrations, the way a booking or a product gets stored.
URLs and structure: the addresses of your pages and the architecture behind them.

A redesign replaces the first two. A rebuild replaces the third and drags the first two along with it. Cost climbs at that boundary, because restyling a booking form takes a designer a few hours while re-implementing one on a new platform takes a developer days, plus testing, plus reconnecting whatever it talks to.

Your traffic risk sits in the fourth layer, and the fourth layer is optional in both projects. You can rebuild on a new CMS and keep every URL you had. You can also approve a redesign that renames sixty pages along the way, which is the version that costs you rankings. You can't read either fact from the word on the quote. Ask which layers change and whether the URL list survives, then read the price against the answer.

Check whether a cheap redesign is available to you

The cheap redesign assumes your content and your design are separate things. On many small business sites they aren't, and whoever built the site settled that years ago.

WordPress with Divi is the clearest case. Divi stores its layouts as shortcodes inside the post content, so a page built with it falls back to bare [et_pb_section] text once the theme stops running (Design Develop Now). Restyling that site means rebuilding each page by hand in a new builder, which is a rebuild wearing a redesign's price tag.

Squarespace splits by version. Squarespace's help centre states you can't switch templates on a version 7.1 site, because 7.1 sites belong to one template family with the same features and style options; you change colours, fonts and page types instead (Squarespace Help Center). Version 7.0 does allow a template switch, and Squarespace tells 7.0 owners moving to 7.1 to review which pages, features and blocks have no exact match on the new version first (Squarespace Help Center).

WordPress with a block theme sits at the friendly end. Your posts, pages, media files and comments survive a theme switch, with only the display changing (WordPress.org).

Run the check on a staging copy rather than your live site: switch to a default theme, or turn the page builder off, and look at what remains. Readable text means the presentation layer lifts off on its own and a redesign is available to you. A screen of shortcodes means your quote should say rebuild.

NZ prices for each, and the ratio between them

Skyrocket, an Auckland agency, publishes tiers for this. A visual redesign with minimal structural change, on the same platform, for a site of ten to fifteen pages: $12,000 to $25,000, over eight to twelve weeks. A full redesign with new information architecture, new copy and a platform migration: $30,000 to $50,000 and up, over twelve to twenty weeks (Skyrocket).

Those figures describe the growth-stage end of the NZ market. A plumber or a cafe pays less, because the lower tiers here cover template configuration rather than custom design and strategy work; our breakdown of NZ website costs sets out those bands with sources.

The ratio travels better than the dollar figures. Inside Skyrocket's own list, the surface-level project runs about 40 to 50% of the full one. A UK agency publishing the same comparison lands in the same place, quoting £4,000 to £12,000 for a redesign against £12,000 to £35,000 for a rebuild (Rubber Duckers). Two price lists on opposite sides of the world put a redesign at roughly 40% of a rebuild, which gives you a blunt sanity check. A "redesign" quoted at 80% of the rebuild number is a rebuild, and the proposal should say so.

The rebuild trigger that has a date on it

Most "signs you need a rebuild" lists describe how the site feels to look at. The trigger that removes your choice has a published date, and your site looks fine on the morning it passes.

PHP security support ended for 8.1 on 31 December 2025, after which the project ships no fixes of any kind for that branch (PHP.Watch). PHP 8.2 reaches the same point on 31 December 2026 (TuxCare). Your pages keep loading either way. Nothing on screen changes.

Drupal 7 reached end of life on 5 January 2025, fourteen years after its release, with no further core or contributed project releases on Drupal.org and no community security support (Drupal.org). A Drupal 7 site still serves traffic today and can't be patched, so its owner is buying a migration regardless of whether the design bothers anyone.

Sites sitting past these dates are common. Perforce's 2026 PHP Landscape Report, a survey of more than 700 open source users, found nearly 20% of teams still running PHP 7.x, which lost support in 2022 (Perforce). Read that as what developers report about their own stacks rather than a census of the web.

Two lines of email will date your rebuild: ask your host which PHP version your site runs on, and which versions they will still support next year.

The line item that gets left off the quote

Content migration and redirects carry the hours on a rebuild, and they scale with your page count rather than with how the site looks.

Count the pages first. Your sitemap.xml lists them, and a site: search on Google gives a rough second opinion. Sixty pages at twenty to forty minutes each, to move the content, reformat it, re-link it and check the images, comes to twenty to forty hours of someone's time. That arithmetic is a model rather than a survey finding, so run it with your own page count before accepting a quote that stays silent on migration.

Redirects are the other half of the bill. Google's site move guidance asks you to prepare a URL map before the move, use permanent server-side redirects, submit a sitemap to speed up discovery, and return 404 or 410 for pages you're dropping. Google's own estimate for the index catching up: a few weeks for most pages on a medium-sized site, longer for larger ones (Google Search Central). Our article on website build timelines covers how long to leave those redirects in place afterwards.

Ask for migration as its own line on the proposal. An agency that quotes design and build with no migration figure has either assumed you'll retype the content yourself or hasn't counted it, and our list of questions to ask an agency covers how to pin that down before you sign.

Two projects most quotes leave out

The redesign-or-rebuild pair hides two combinations worth asking for by name.

Replatform and keep the design. Move off the dying CMS onto a current one, carry the existing layout across, keep the URLs. Nothing looks different on Monday and the security clock resets. This is the right project when a support date forced your hand and the design still does its job. Our comparison of Squarespace, Webflow and custom builds covers where each platform's ceiling sits before you pick the destination.

Rebuild the front end and keep the platform. New templates, same CMS, same addresses, same admin screens your staff already know. This one costs less than a migration and carries no indexing risk, and it's available any time the presentation layer comes off cleanly. It also fixes most of what makes a site slow to load, since the front end is where those seconds go.

A five-question test

Answer these, and the project names itself.

Turn the theme or page builder off on a staging copy. Is your content still readable text? A screen of shortcodes means rebuild.
Ask your host your PHP version, or check your CMS version against its vendor's support dates. Past end of life means rebuild, on a schedule set by the date rather than by taste.
Do the URLs change? If they do, add a redirect map, a re-indexing window of a few weeks, and someone watching Search Console to the quote, whichever word is on the cover.
Does anything change in how you store bookings, products or enquiries? A yes puts you in the platform layer and the developer days that come with it.
Count your pages and multiply by half an hour. That's the migration bill missing from the proposal.

A site answering "text", "supported", "no" and "no" needs a redesign, and the price should land near 40% of the rebuild figure you were quoted. A site failing the first two questions needs a rebuild, and buying a visual refresh instead pays for a repaint on a house you'll replace next year.