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Redesign when the problem is how the site looks and reads; rebuild when the problem is what the site cannot do. The tell is the workaround list: if the team keeps more than a handful of manual steps, plugins or spreadsheets propping the site up, a redesign buys about a year before the same conversation. Here is how to decide, and what each one costs.
Updated · 3 min read
A redesign changes the presentation: brand, layout, copy, imagery, the path to the enquiry or the checkout. The platform underneath stays. A rebuild changes the platform or the architecture: the site moves to something that can do what the business now needs.
They get confused because both produce a new-looking site, and because a redesign is what most agencies sell. The question underneath is simple. Is the site failing at communicating, or failing at functioning? The answer decides which project you are buying.
The site works but looks like the year it was built. The message has changed and the pages have not. Conversion is poor on pages that are technically fine. The mobile layout is cramped. The team can still edit content without a developer, and the platform is supported and reasonably fast.
On an existing platform, a redesign of a business site typically runs CAD $15,000 to $50,000 and takes weeks rather than months. The risk is spending it on a site that needed the other project.
Every change needs a developer. The plugin or app count is past twenty and nobody knows what half of them do. The platform is unsupported or out of its depth: Magento 1, an abandoned theme, a page builder asked to run a real catalog. The site is slow for structural reasons rather than image sizes. It cannot meet an accessibility or privacy requirement without a fight. A new channel is coming, wholesale, Amazon, a second brand, and the site cannot model it.
A rebuild runs from roughly CAD $30,000 for a business site to $150,000 and beyond for an ecommerce platform with real integrations, and takes months. It is the larger project and the one that stays solved.
The expensive mistake is a redesign of a site that needed rebuilding: a year of looking good on a platform that still cannot do the job, followed by paying for the rebuild anyway with a fresh design to throw away. The cheaper mistake, still a mistake, is rebuilding a site that needed a redesign, which buys a migration and a redirect map nobody asked for.
One test settles most cases. Write down the five things the site has to do in two years. If the current platform does all five with reasonable effort, redesign. If it fails two, rebuild.
Keep the URLs or map every one of them, because a redesign that quietly changes addresses is a rebuild's SEO risk at a redesign's price. Keep what converts: do not redesign a checkout that works because the brand changed. Measure before and after, conversion rate, speed, leads, so the project has a result rather than an opinion. Write the brief around outcomes, not a list of pages.
We do both, and the first call is usually spent deciding which one you actually need. If the honest answer is a redesign, that is what we quote.
Yes, and usually should. Move the part that hurts most first, often the store or the product pages, and let the rest follow. A redirect map keeps search rankings intact across the phases.
There is no schedule. Redesign when the message or the conversion data says so, not because the site is three years old. A well-built site gets continuous small changes instead of one big one every few years.
No. Content, product data, analytics history and everything you have learned about customers carry over. What changes is the platform and the templates that render them.
A Shopify migration for a catalog of a few hundred to a few thousand products typically takes 8 to 14 weeks, and the work that protects revenue is a complete 301 redirect map built before anything else. Customer passwords never migrate, Shopify sets your URL structure for you, and the old platform's bad data follows you unless it is cleaned first.
RegulationSince January 1, 2021, Ontario organizations with 50 or more employees in Ontario must make their public websites conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA under the AODA. Here is who it covers, what it actually requires, and how to check your site.
Custom softwareIn Canada a focused internal tool typically costs CAD $15,000 to $40,000, a customer-facing web application $40,000 to $120,000, and a SaaS product you can charge for $100,000 to $250,000 before the first paying customer. Integrations, user roles and undecided requirements move the number; the count of screens does not.
Nockta builds ecommerce, custom software, and Amazon operations for businesses across Ontario and Quebec. See where we work or the full service list.