Sometimes it’s your CFO. Sometimes it’s a trustee who just watched a peer institution launch. The website redesign cost question usually arrives before anyone has scoped the work, which makes it hard to answer well. You still need a number. Cabinets approve budgets, and budgets need figures.
We’ve been scoping these projects for colleges and universities for roughly three decades, so we’ll give you the working answer: what enterprise redesigns typically cost, the variables that move the number, and the line items that tend to vanish from first drafts.
How much does a website redesign cost?
For a college or university running an enterprise-scale site, a full redesign typically lands in the low to mid six figures and takes 12 to 18 months from kickoff to launch. On the high end, that covers discovery and research, information architecture, design, user testing, technical integrations, development, content creation, taxonomy development, content migration (for over a 1000 pages), accessibility testing, and launch support on a modern CMS.
A website refresh is the lighter alternative. It updates the design layer and key user pathways while keeping your existing architecture and platform, typically runs 4 to 6 months, and costs roughly a quarter of a full redesign. If you suspect a refresh might be enough, our guide to how often you should redesign your website covers how to make that call.
Thin research is the most common reason we see redesigned sites underperform the sites they replaced.
What moves the number up or down
Research depth
A redesign informed by discovery research including stakeholder interviews, usability testing with actual prospective students, and a hard look at your analytics, costs more up front than one that skips it. It also converts. Thin research is the most common reason we see redesigned sites underperform the sites they replaced.
Platform and licensing
Open source platforms like Drupal and WordPress carry no license fees but ask more of your development and hosting decisions. SaaS platforms built for higher ed bundle hosting and support into recurring costs. We build on both, and neither is cheaper across the board. The comparison that matters is total cost over five years: licensing, hosting, maintenance, and the internal staff time each model demands.
Integrations
These are your CRM, your course catalog, event calendars, faculty directories, program finders, giving platforms. Each connection adds scope, and connections to legacy or heavily customized systems add more. The integration inventory is one of the first things we ask for when scoping a project, because it tightens an estimate faster than almost anything else.
Each complex integration can add scope. An integration inventory can help clarify what is needed and how complex each integration needs to be.
Content migration
Page count is typically a strong predictor of cost. A 10,000-page site costs more to migrate, restructure, and quality-check than a 1,500-page site, and most institutional sites carry years of accumulated pages nobody has audited. Pruning before you migrate reduces both cost and risk, and a content audit settles what stays. Your future editors will thank you.
Accessibility requirements
Public institutions face ADA Title II compliance deadlines beginning in April 2027, and private institutions carry their own legal and mission-driven obligations. We’ve built sites for the Hadley Institute for the Blind, The Braille Institute, and the Perkins School for the Blind, organizations where accessibility is the mission itself, and the lesson from that work transfers everywhere: building it into design and development costs far less than remediating after launch.
Public institutions face ADA Title II compliance deadlines beginning in April 2027.
Governance complexity
More stakeholders means more review cycles and more revision rounds. Decentralized institutions with dozens of departmental site owners should budget for coordination.
Don't forget these line items
Content strategy and rewriting
Migrating content is one task. Making it work for prospective students is another. Budget for content strategy, for rewriting priority pages, and for the internal staff hours your team will spend reviewing.
Accessibility auditing and remediation
Automated scans catch a fraction of what matters. Manual accessibility testing, including testing with assistive technology, belongs in the budget.
Training and documentation
Training protects your investment. So does documentation that outlasts staff turnover, which on higher ed web teams is a question of when, never if.
Post-launch maintenance
Security updates, module and plugin maintenance, performance monitoring, ongoing improvement. Sites that launch without a maintenance plan degrade quietly, and that slow degradation is usually what triggers the next premature redesign.
SEO preservation
Make sure to consider redirects, metadata migration, and set up rank monitoring to protect the organic traffic and AI search visibility your current site has spent years earning.
Is this a good investment in the age of AI search?
It’s the question of the year: why spend six figures on a website when prospective students increasingly start with ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews?
Because AI search doesn’t replace your website. It reads it. When a prospective student asks an AI tool about programs, cost, or outcomes, the answer gets assembled from the institutions whose sites make that information easy to find, extract, and trust. Structured content models, clear entity relationships, accessible markup, fast pages: what a well-scoped redesign builds is precisely what makes your institution citable.
The redesign, in other words, isn’t a bet against AI search. It’s may be necessary to perform well in it.
How long does a website redesign take?
The 12 to 18 month range holds for most enterprise higher ed projects. Discovery and strategy typically occupy the first few months, design and development the middle stretch, and migration, testing, and launch preparation the final phase. A refresh compresses to 4 to 6 months because architecture and platform stay put.
Higher ed adds a timing constraint to consider: the academic calendar. Nobody wants to cut over to a new site the week applications open. Work backward from a launch window that gives your team room to stabilize before traffic peaks, and treat that window as a project requirement rather than a preference.
What the investment should return
A budget request framed around enrollment outcomes is an easier sell than one framed around a dated design. We’ve watched both versions get presented, and the room often responds differently. The strongest business cases start with the enrollment funnel: where prospective students drop off, what those losses cost annually, and what a measurable improvement would return.
The returns are real when the work is done well. After redesigning with us, Lane Community College saw a 26% enrollment increase. St. Cloud Technical & Community College saw a 14% enrollment increase and earned a Paragon Award for the work. When the site is the front door to enrollment, improving it moves the number your cabinet actually cares about.
Building the budget request
A website redesign budget request that wins approval is a one-page argument with numbers attached, not a spreadsheet with hope attached. Cabinets don’t fund websites; they fund outcomes. Build the page around five elements.
The ask. Present a range, not a single figure, and be clear about what affects it: depth of research, page volume, integrations, and platform decisions.
The return. This is where you need to be clear about your KPIs. Give some thought to what success will look like. Is it expressed in site traffic, session engagement length, RFI fills, lower call volume, content clarity and optimization, site speed. How do we predict all of these elements will support increased enrollment and lower other operational costs in the long run? Find the steps where prospective students drop off, price what that loss costs annually, and state what a measurable improvement would return. A number tied to applications reads differently than a number tied to new aesthetics.
The cost of waiting. A request without a “do nothing” column lets people believe deferral is free. It isn’t: accessibility exposure compounds as deadlines approach, an aging platform’s maintenance costs climb, slow sites lose visibility in search engines and frustrate users, and the enrollment losses you priced in the previous paragraph repeat every year the decision waits.
Phased options. A cabinet that balks at full scope may be more willing to approve a discovery phase that proves value, and discovery has a second virtue: it produces the scoped estimate that replaces your range with a more informed and exact number. A phased plan signals you’ve thought about risk the way they do.
Contingency. Include a named line of 10 to 15 percent. Scope discoveries during content migration may happen, and a budget that clearly leaves some room for the ‘odds and ends and unknowns’ that may come up along the way will help the whole project team breathe easier.
If the next step is a formal procurement process, our guide to writing a website redesign RFP covers how to structure the document so the proposals you receive are actually comparable. We would also be happy to talk through some ways to make a solid case to secure the budget you need.
Frequently asked questions about website redesigns cost
For colleges and universities with enterprise-scale sites, a full redesign typically costs six figures. The final number depends on research scope, platform choice, integrations, content volume, accessibility requirements, and how many stakeholders the project needs to coordinate.
Six variables carry most of the weight: research depth, platform and licensing model, the number and complexity of integrations, content volume to migrate, accessibility requirements, and governance complexity. Two institutions with similar sites can land far apart based on these alone.
Beyond design and development: content strategy and rewriting, accessibility auditing and remediation, CMS training and documentation, SEO preservation, post-launch maintenance, and a contingency line for scope discovered during migration.
Yes. A refresh typically costs roughly a quarter of a full redesign because it keeps your existing architecture and CMS while updating the design layer and key user pathways.
