TJ Slade
Web designer · Kansas City
We need a new website almost never starts as a decision. It starts as a feeling, usually after seeing a competitor's site, or after a customer says something polite about yours. I'm TJ Slade, I build small business websites in the Kansas City metro, and I turn down more redesigns than I take, because most of the sites people bring me do not need replacing. They need four hours of work and somebody to say so out loud.
A website redesign is one of the few purchases where spending more can make things worse. A rebuild throws away pages that were already ranking, resets a site that visitors knew how to use, and takes weeks you could have spent fixing the two things that were actually costing you calls. So before anyone quotes you anything, it is worth knowing which of three jobs you are really buying.
Three levels, and most sites need the cheapest one
- Fix. Hours, not weeks. The structure stays, the design stays, and you correct what is broken or out of date.
- Refresh. A week or two. Same pages and same platform, new look and rewritten copy on the pages that matter.
- Rebuild. Three to six weeks. New structure, usually a new platform, and everything moves.
Roughly speaking, half the sites I look at need level one, a third need level two, and the rest genuinely need level three. Guessing wrong upward is expensive, and guessing wrong downward means you pay twice, so it is worth being honest about which one you are in.
When an afternoon of fixes is enough
If the site looks dated but works, if people can find your phone number, if the pages you care about are there, and if it loads in a few seconds on a phone, you almost certainly do not need a redesign. You need the list of small things nobody has gotten around to: the copyright year, last spring's hours, a form nobody has tested since launch, three photos of people who no longer work there, and a headline that never said what you actually do.
Those are exactly the signs a website is quietly losing customers, and every one of them is fixable without touching the design. If that describes yours, the honest advice is to spend a few hundred dollars on fixes and put the rest into photos, reviews, or Google Business Profile work, all of which move the phone more than a new color palette will.
When a refresh is the right call
A refresh makes sense when the bones are fine but the surface is working against you. The pages you need exist, the site is maintainable, and nothing is fundamentally broken, but the design reads as another decade, the copy was written by committee in 2017, or the whole thing was clearly built for a desktop screen and squeezed onto phones afterward.
You keep your URLs, which means you keep your rankings, and you keep whatever people already know about navigating your site. The work goes into the visible layer: a new look, rewritten pages, real photography, and a clear path to contacting you. It is usually a week or two of work rather than a month, and it costs a fraction of a rebuild because nothing has to be moved.
When a rebuild actually earns it
Sometimes the structure itself is the problem, and no amount of surface work fixes it. The signs are specific:
- You cannot add a page without calling someone, and there is no room for the services or locations you want to cover.
- The site is slow in a way that no image compression fixes, because the platform itself is the weight.
- It was never built for phones, and most of your traffic is on one.
- Nobody has the logins, the person who built it is unreachable, or it runs on something no longer supported.
- The CMS has been neglected so long that updating it safely costs more than starting over.
- Your business changed. You sell something different now, or to different people, and the site describes a company that no longer exists.
Two or more of those and a rebuild is the cheaper option over three years, not the expensive one. One of them on its own usually is not enough, and the fix is often narrower than it looks. If you are not sure which platform you would even be rebuilding onto, that decision is its own conversation, and I laid it out in WordPress or a custom-built site.
The part nobody warns you about: keeping your rankings
The most expensive redesign mistake in this town has nothing to do with design. It is a new site launched over the old one with different page addresses and no redirects, so every link Google had built up over years now points at a 404. Traffic drops the week after launch, nobody connects it to the redesign for a month, and by then the rankings are gone and getting them back takes longer than the build did.
The fix is unglamorous and takes an afternoon: a redirect map, every old address pointed at its new equivalent before launch. Google publishes exactly how it expects this to work in its guide to site moves with URL changes. Ask any designer quoting you a rebuild whether a redirect map is included and who writes it. If the answer is vague, that is the whole conversation right there.
What a redesign costs in Kansas City
Prices here spread wider than most people expect, because the three levels are three different jobs. A round of fixes is hours of work. A refresh of a small site is usually a low four figure number. A full rebuild of a five page site starts around two thousand dollars for a hand-built static site and moves up from there once you need a system you can edit yourself, more pages, or a store. The current ranges are all published on the pricing page, including the fixed-scope options where the price and the page count are both set before anyone starts.
Whatever you are quoted, make sure it names the page count, says who writes the copy, and says whether redirects and content migration are included. Those three items are where redesign quotes drift, and it is also why two bids for the same site can differ by thousands. There is more on the cost of a website in Kansas City if you want the full breakdown before you get bids.
How to decide this week
You can settle this yourself in about twenty minutes. Open your site on your phone with wifi off and answer these:
- Does the homepage load and become readable in about three seconds?
- Can a stranger tell what you do and where you do it from the first screen?
- Is your phone number one tap away from anywhere on the site?
- Does your contact form actually deliver? Send one and check, spam folder included.
- Is anything on the site untrue right now: hours, prices, staff, services you dropped?
- Could you add a new page yourself next week if you had to?
All yes means you need fixes, not a redesign. Mostly yes with a site that looks its age means a refresh. Two or more hard nos, especially the last one, means a rebuild is probably the honest answer.
If you want a second opinion first
I would rather talk you out of a redesign you do not need than sell you one, because the referrals from that are better than the invoice. Send me your address and I will tell you which of the three levels your site is in and what I would do first if it were mine. If it turns out you need the rebuild, you will at least know why, and you will have a redirect map in the quote.