Website Redesign in Gatineau and Ottawa: Cost, Timeline and How to Keep Your Google Rankings

The short answer

In the Gatineau-Ottawa market in 2026, this is what a website redesign usually costs:

• Visual refresh: $2,000 to $5,000. A new design on the same structure and content, for a site of five to ten pages. Good when the site works but looks dated.
• Full redesign for a small business: $5,000 to $12,000. A new structure, rewritten copy, a page for each service and each area you serve, local SEO and a clean migration. This is where most businesses that want more leads land.
• Bilingual site: add 30 to 50%. French and English written for each audience, not run through a translator.
• Online store, booking or custom features: $12,000 to $25,000 and up. The price follows the complexity of what the site has to do.

Most small business redesigns take four to eight weeks. These ranges line up with our guide to what a new website costs in Canada. A redesign is rarely cheaper than a new site, because the old content still has to be reviewed, rewritten and moved.

The part that rarely shows up in quotes is the one that matters most: protecting the Google rankings your current site has earned. More on that below.

Signs it is time to redesign

A redesign is worth it when the site is costing you clients, not just when it looks old. The usual signs:

• Visitors leave on mobile. Most local searches happen on a phone. If your pages are slow or awkward there, people go back to Google and call the next result.
• Google does not know what you do, or where. One page lists every service, no page mentions your cities, and your projects are photos with no text. Search engines rank pages, not businesses, so every missing page is a missing search.
• You cannot update it yourself. Every change waits for a developer, or the builder is so painful that the site stays frozen.
• The platform is holding you back. Builders like Wix and Squarespace are fine to start with, but they limit speed, structure and technical SEO once you compete for real searches.
• It is not properly in French. A Québec business needs a French site, and Bill 96 makes it a legal requirement.
• It no longer looks like your business. Your work has moved upmarket and the site still looks like the day you opened.

What moves the price

Two quotes for the same "ten-page site" can differ by a factor of three. The gap almost always comes from these five things:

• Copywriting. Reusing your current text is cheaper, but thin text is often why the old site does not rank. Professional writing usually adds $1,500 to $5,000.
• The number of templates, not pages. Ten service pages built on one template cost less than ten unique layouts.
• The second language. A bilingual redesign is a second site's worth of content, review and SEO.
• Features. A quote form with photo uploads, booking, online payment, a client portal or links to your other tools each add development time.
• Photography. Real photos of your work beat stock images. A half-day shoot is often the best money spent in the whole project.

How to keep your Google rankings

A careless redesign can wipe out years of rankings in a weekend. The causes are predictable, and so are the fixes:

1. Take an inventory before you touch anything. Export every URL of the current site and note, in Google Search Console and Analytics, which pages bring visits and leads. Those pages are your assets.
2. Redirect every old URL. When an address changes, for example /about-us becoming /about, set a permanent 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. Without it, Google and anyone with a saved link land on a dead page. Leaving Wix almost always changes your URLs, so this step is not optional.
3. Keep what ranks, improve the rest. Pages that already rank keep their topic and their main keywords. Rewrite them to make them better, not to make them different.
4. Keep your business details identical. Your name, address and phone number must match your Google Business Profile exactly. Your reviews live on that profile, not on your website, so a redesign does not touch them.
5. Launch, then watch for two months. Submit the new sitemap in Search Console, fix the 404 errors it reports, and expect positions to move for two to four weeks before they settle, usually higher than before.
6. Pick a quiet launch date. A landscaper should not launch in May, and a restaurant should not launch the week of Valentine's Day.

Ask every agency you talk to how they handle redirects. If the answer is vague, the risk is yours.

A realistic timeline

For a small business site of eight to fifteen pages, a redesign usually runs like this:

• Week 1, discovery. Goals, audience, an inventory of the current site, and a questionnaire about your business.
• Weeks 2 and 3, structure and design. A site map, then a design for the home page and one inner page that you approve before the rest is built.
• Weeks 3 to 5, content and development. Writing, photos, building the pages, forms and on-page SEO.
• Weeks 5 and 6, revisions and testing. Two rounds of changes, mobile tests, speed checks and the redirect map.
• Launch week. Go-live, redirects, Search Console, and a short training so you can update the site yourself.

The schedule depends as much on you as on the agency. Projects that slip are almost always waiting on text, photos or an approval.

How to compare quotes

Ask every agency or freelancer these questions. The answers tell you more than the total at the bottom of the quote:

• Who owns the site, the domain and the content when the project ends?
• Are 301 redirects from the old site included?
• Is copywriting included, and in which languages?
• How many rounds of revisions, and what happens after that?
• What are the yearly costs after launch: hosting, domain, licences, maintenance?
• Can I add pages and projects myself, without paying for every change?
• What support do I get in the weeks after launch?

If one quote is far cheaper than the others, look for what is missing. It is usually the writing, the redirects or the SEO, which are exactly the parts that make a redesign pay for itself. To plan your search budget after launch, see what SEO costs in Gatineau and Ottawa.

We design and redesign sites for businesses across the region, from Gatineau to Ottawa. If you want a second opinion on your current site, we will tell you honestly whether it needs a redesign, a refresh or just a few fixes.

Questions we hear