What a Website Rebuild Should Actually Cost
A rough, honest breakdown of where the budget goes on a marketing site rebuild — and the two line items most quotes quietly leave out.
A typical marketing site rebuild (10-20 pages, custom design, CMS, no e-commerce) breaks down roughly into: 35% design and IA, 45% front-end build and CMS integration, 10% QA and performance, 10% launch and handoff.
The two line items most quotes leave out: content migration (someone has to move and rewrite the old copy — it's never a simple copy-paste) and post-launch iteration (the first month of real traffic always surfaces things a staging environment didn't).
If a quote is dramatically cheaper than everything else you've seen, ask specifically what happens to Core Web Vitals, accessibility, and mobile responsiveness — those are the corners that get cut first when a build is under-quoted.
A realistic timeline for the scope above is 4-6 weeks from signed content to launch, assuming content is ready when design starts. Most delays come from content not being ready, not from the build itself.
