Every few weeks I get asked "how much should a redesign cost?" and the honest answer is always "it depends" — not because I'm dodging the question, but because "redesign" covers at least three completely different projects.
A visual refresh (new colors, fonts, cleaned-up layout on the same structure) might run a few hundred dollars. A structural redesign with new UX and rewritten content is a different animal — usually $2,000-$8,000 for a small business site. And a full rebuild on a new platform is closer to $8,000-$25,000+, because you're starting from near-zero rather than reusing what already exists.
The part most owners don't budget for: content rewriting. Everyone budgets for design and development, almost nobody budgets for the actual copywriting/content-restructuring work, and it's often the single biggest time sink in the whole project.
The mistake that costs the most after launch, from a technical standpoint: skipping 301 redirects when URLs change. I've seen redesigns that looked great and quietly lost half their organic traffic within weeks because old URLs just 404'd instead of redirecting.
Full cost breakdown by redesign type, business size, and a real project budget example: https://amanurrahman.com/blog-post/website-redesign-cost