What does a website relaunch cost?

Roughly the same as a new website plus migration effort: with us, business websites start at 5,000–8,000 €, static Astro sites at 5,000 € – a relaunch adds content migration and redirect mapping on top. The honest calculation also counts the operating costs of the coming years: a relaunch that lowers maintenance effort finances part of its own cost.

How long does a website relaunch take?

Typically four to eight weeks from the final briefing – depending on content volume and how fast feedback loops run. The most common delay is not the technology but missing content: sorting out texts and images during development doubles the timeline. That is why the content inventory comes first with us, not last.

Will I lose my Google rankings in a relaunch?

Only if mistakes happen – and exactly those are avoidable. The three biggest: letting old URLs die without 301 redirects, deleting ranking content without replacement, and taking the development environment's noindex live. With complete redirect mapping, a content-versus-search-data check before deleting, and a technical launch checklist, visibility survives – and often rises afterwards, because the new site is faster.

Relaunch or just rework the existing website?

A refresh (texts, images, individual sections) is enough as long as the technology and structure hold. A relaunch pays off when the foundation is the problem: outdated technology that turns updates into risks, load times that stay poor despite optimization, a design that costs trust, or content that structurally misses the demand. Rule of thumb: when the list of individual fixes exceeds the rebuild, the rebuild is the more honest calculation.

Website Relaunch: Cost, Process, and the Priciest SEO Traps

In short: A website relaunch costs roughly as much as a new website plus migration: with us 5,000–8,000 € for business websites, from 5,000 € for static Astro sites – plus content migration and redirect mapping. The redirect mapping is the item where saving costs the most: without it, the new site loses the rankings the old one built.

A website relaunch is two projects in one: building a new website – and losing nothing of what the old one earned along the way. The second part gets underestimated regularly, and that is exactly where the most expensive mistakes happen. This article lays out both: what a relaunch costs, how it runs cleanly, and which SEO traps destroy rankings that took years to grow.

When a relaunch is due – and when a refresh is enough

Not every ageing website needs a rebuild. A refresh – new texts, current images, reworked sections – is enough as long as technology and page structure hold. A relaunch is due when the foundation is the problem:

The technology is so outdated that every update is a risk – or updates stopped coming entirely.
Load times stay poor despite optimization, because the foundation caps them.
The design visibly costs trust – the website looks older than the company.
The structure no longer matches the offering: services are missing, ranking content leads nowhere.

The rule of thumb: when the list of individual fixes grows longer and more expensive than the rebuild, the rebuild is the more honest calculation.

What a relaunch costs

The base is the price of a new website: with us, business websites start at 5,000–8,000 € with a fixed-price quote, static Astro sites at 5,000 €. A relaunch adds two items a greenfield build doesn’t have:

Content migration: reviewing, carrying over, and culling existing content. Manual work at twenty pages, its own sub-project at two hundred.
Redirect mapping: every old URL gets a defined destination. Meticulous work with a direct effect on visibility – and the first item missing from cheap quotes.

The honest total also looks ahead: build and operating costs belong in one calculation. A relaunch that moves from maintenance-heavy technology to a static site lowers running costs noticeably – financing part of the rebuild over three to five years.

The process in six steps

Inventory. Which pages rank, which bring inquiries, which does nobody read? Search Console and analytics data decide what the new site must inherit – before anything gets designed.
Goals and structure. What should the new website deliver, for whom, with which pages? This is also where the technology decision falls – we’ve documented the decision path separately.
Content first. Texts and images get settled before development, not during it. Missing content is the most common reason relaunches take twice as long as planned.
Design and development. Built on a development environment – with feedback in fixed loops instead of permanent back-and-forth.
Redirect mapping and launch check. Every old URL gets its 301 redirect; the technical checklist runs: indexability, load times, forms, structured data.
Launch and observation. After going live, Search Console gets watched for weeks: crawl errors, 404 hits, ranking movement. A relaunch is only finished once the curves are stable.

The priciest SEO traps in a relaunch

Almost every relaunch damage we see in audits traces back to one of these five mistakes:

Forgotten redirects. Old URLs die with 404s, and with them the rankings and every external link that ever pointed at them. The rule is simple and inconvenient: every indexed URL gets a 301 redirect to its closest content equivalent – not wholesale to the homepage.

Our generator takes the tedious part off your hands – paste the old-new list, copy the finished .htaccess rules:
301 Redirect Generator

Generate redirects for .htaccess

One line per redirect: old address, a space or arrow, new address. Everything runs in your browser.
Old → New (one line per redirect)
Goes into the .htaccess in the web root, above the WordPress block. Order matters: more specific paths first. Afterwards, test each old URL once in the browser.
```
# Enter redirects above …
```
Your URLs never leave the browser – the rules are generated locally via JavaScript.
Changing URLs without need. Every changed URL is a move with friction loss. Where the structure doesn’t get decisively better, addresses stay as they are.
Deleting ranking content. “The old guide page doesn’t fit the new design” is not a reason to delete a page that brings monthly visitors. Only the check against search data decides what may go.
Taking noindex live. The development environment is blocked for Google – and that block travels to the live site alarmingly often. A classic with total-loss potential that costs two minutes in the launch check.
Launching slower than before. If the new site loads heavier than the old one, the relaunch wastes its biggest lever. Load time is a design decision in a rebuild, not an afterthought.

The technology switch as a relaunch opportunity

If you are rebuilding anyway, don’t skip the technology question: a relaunch is the one moment where switching from a maintenance-heavy setup to a static architecture costs no extra migration. Whether that pays off for your case is weighed honestly in Astro instead of WordPress? – and when a move to a headless system makes sense, in the replatforming article.

An honest conclusion

A good relaunch is unspectacular: visitors see a faster, clearer website – and Google sees the same content under cleanly redirected addresses. The costs are plannable when migration and redirects are priced in from the start instead of arriving as a surprise. And the biggest mistake isn’t a technical one: it is the relaunch without a look at your own data – replacing a website without knowing what worked about it.

Thinking about a relaunch? Send us your website – we’ll look at technology, load time, and search data, and tell you honestly whether it needs a rebuild or a refresh will do: drop us a line. Fixed price and process: have a website built.