Company Website Redesign Process and Cost: The Complete HK SME Guide
Six stages of a redesign project, HK market price benchmarks, and the factors that move your budget — read this before redesigning your company site.
The six stages of a redesign project
A proper redesign is not “draw a new look and swap it in”. It runs six stages. One, discovery: business goals, target customers, reference sites and success metrics. Two, content audit and information architecture: decide page by page what stays, what dies, how the new structure is organized and which URLs change — the foundation of the whole project, and the step most people want to skip. Three, wireframes: each page's structure and hierarchy mapped while changes are cheapest. Four, UI design: the brand system applied, usually two to three revision rounds. Five, development and migration: pages built, CMS wired, and the 301 redirect map written. Six, QA and launch: browser and device testing, speed checks, Search Console verification, cutover from the old site.
On timing: a standard Hong Kong SME corporate site (fifteen to twenty pages, bilingual) usually takes six to twelve weeks; membership systems, e-commerce or heavy migration push it to three to six months. Which stage goes wrong most often? Almost always stage two, the content audit — because that's when the company discovers it doesn't actually know how many pages it has or which ones still matter. The first deliverable of a redesign is not a design mockup; it's a clean sitemap.
Market benchmarks: what redesigns cost in Hong Kong
Be clear about what these numbers are: market observations (street prices), not our quote. In Hong Kong, a template-based redesign with light customization trades around HK$8,000–25,000; a custom-designed corporate site redesign around HK$30,000–150,000 depending on design complexity, features and migration load; e-commerce platforms and feature-heavy builds start around HK$80,000 and large projects pass HK$200,000. Designer day rates run about HK$500–1,500, so the longer a project drags and the more the brief shifts, the higher the invoice.
How do we quote? Website projects are quoted per scope, because page counts, features and migration complexity vary too much between projects — a flat “one price fits all” only forces studios to cut scope quietly. Everything we can publish, we do: our SEO monthly plans and GEO plans sit in plain sight on the services page (/en/services), and you can read why we price this way (/en/blog/why-we-publish-our-prices). For website projects, talk scope with us and you'll get an itemized quote you can interrogate line by line.
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Free SEO auditFive factors that push cost up
The “same” redesign can differ five-fold in price, usually because of five things. One, original design versus template: bespoke UI costs human hours per screen; adapting a high-quality template is far cheaper. Two, content: does the studio write copy or do you? Bilingual or trilingual? Translation and review are the most commonly forgotten line items. Three, migration load: how many old pages exist, how many URLs need 301s, how much product data moves — a hundred-page legacy site and a ten-page site are different worlds. Four, integrations: member login, payments, ERP hooks, language switching — each is its own engineering job. Five, motion and interaction: beautiful, but every second of animation costs money and needs performance work to keep speed healthy.
There's also a cost that never appears on the quote: your time. During a redesign you review content, review mockups and make decisions; a project that drags three months can eat more management time than the project fee itself. So the first cut in controlling redesign cost is usually not squeezing the design fee — it's narrowing scope and deciding faster.
Practical ways to bring cost down
Want it cheaper without cutting corners? Five practical moves. One, write a clear brief: goals, reference sites, and two separate lists for “must have” and “nice to have” — the less a studio has to guess, the sharper the quote. Two, draft your own content first: nobody knows your industry better; you write the first pass, the studio polishes and optimizes. You save real writing hours. Three, phase the build: launch the core ten pages first, collect data, then add features — don't do everything in one shot. Four, decide languages upfront: committing to bilingual now means designing once; adding English after launch means doing much of it twice. Five, freeze big changes late: restructuring the information architecture after mockups exist is the most expensive way to change your mind, which is why the stage-two audit matters.
The common thread: every one of these reduces uncertainty. A chunk of any quote is risk premium — the studio doesn't know how many revisions you'll request or whether the brief will change mid-stream. The more certain your requirements, the lower the risk buffer and the closer the price sits to actual work.
The running costs after launch
A redesign is not a one-time-only bill. Sites need feeding: hosting, security updates, content changes, backups. Hong Kong maintenance retainers trade around HK$1,500–6,000/month depending on service level and change volume. Ask line by line: are SSL, CDN and daily backups included? How many content updates per month? What's the incident response time? These are the real costs of the long-term relationship.
If SEO is one of the redesign's goals (it should be), budget the optimization retainer too. Hong Kong SEO retainers trade in three tiers: entry HK$3,000–8,000/month, mainstream HK$8,000–20,000, and HK$20,000+ in competitive industries (our SEO pricing post breaks this down, /en/blog/search-engine-optimization-hk). Our own SEO plans carry public prices: Starter HK$4,000/month, Professional HK$6,000/month, Enterprise quoted per scope — all visible on the services page.
Before you ask for a quote: five things to prepare
How do you get an accurate quote? Prepare five things. One, the site's mission in one sentence: more enquiries, online sales, or brand presence? Two, current data: GA4 and Search Console access, the past year's traffic and enquiry counts. Three, a page inventory: how many pages exist now, how many the new site needs. Four, a feature list split into “must” and “want”. Five, be honest about budget range and deadline — naming a budget doesn't raise the price; it lets the studio advise what fits now and what can wait.
The better the preparation, the sharper and fairer the quote, because the studio prices your actual project instead of its guesswork. Across ten-plus years and 400-plus projects, one lesson repeats: the most expensive line item is never design — it's unclear requirements. To start the conversation, visit our web design service page (/en/web-design-hong-kong); to find out how hurt your current site is first, run a free audit (/en/free-audit).
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We don't publish a fake teaser price. Tell us your pages, features and goals, and you'll get an itemized, per-scope quote you can question line by line.