Are you planning a major redesign to your Drupal website? You’re not alone. We see clients go through website redesigns at an average of every 3 to 5 years. After that, even the best websites start to age out.
The most common factors influencing a company’s need for a website redesign include:
- New brand and messaging.
- Changes to product offerings.
- Mergers and acquisitions with other companies that need to be brought under one website (we’re seeing this a lot lately).
- The existing website’s design and user experience (UX) are feeling outdated.
- Major version CMS system upgrades.
- New integrations or systems need to connect to the website .
The web is always evolving forward, similar to music. New design patterns emerge and then everyone starts doing them. Look at your music playlist from a few years ago—it may feel out of step with the music of the moment. Go back 10 years and you are basically listening to oldies.
It’s not really moving all that fast, but new ideas in UX and new technical capabilities continually push the web forward, keeping it a vibrant marketing tool. Objectively speaking, there is no single more valuable tool in your marketing arsenal than your web presence—we’d say that even if we weren’t a website development firm.
How much does a Drupal website redesign cost?
Drupal is an incredibly powerful and flexible content management system that can mold around your business. There are solutions to match most any budget, but as a US-based team, these are the cost ranges we typically see for end-to-end Drupal development projects*:
- Simple Drupal Website (6-8 Weeks): $50,000-$100,000.
- Moderately Complex Drupal Website (8-12 Weeks): $100,000-$200,000.
- Highly Custom Drupal Website (12+ Weeks): $200,000+.
*External vendor time, not your internal team’s time.
What drives the cost of a Drupal website redesign?
The cost for a Drupal website is driven by the size and scope of your website along with the level of customizations needed in development (nearly all companies need some form of customization).
We’ve built hundreds of Drupal websites over the last 15 years, and the three primary areas that drive the time/cost for Drupal development are:
- The complexity of the theme. The complexity of your design/UX or “theme” is the ultimate cost driver. The graphic design costs can range from a few thousand dollars upwards to $100,000. Moving in lockstep with that is the front-end development time needed to build that theme. You can assume that the more you are spending on the design work, the more time it's going to take to build.
- Custom integrations. Custom integrations — say with member management, ticketing system, CRM, or other non-standard tools — are the second cost driver for project budgets. Standard integrations can be as simple as adding an extension, but a custom API integration can easily be a couple of weeks of senior development time.
- The scale of content migration. While Drupal has a strong Migrate API, typically you are upgrading and want to take advantage of the new capabilities of the new Drupal system. For example, leveraging paragraphs and sections in Drupal 9. This then becomes a “mapping” project to get content that might be in one big body area field, mapped over into a bunch of individual sections. Here are some tips on how to structure your Drupal content migration.
Final thoughts
The cost ranges we presented are all based on development time, and that time is driven 100% by the level of complexity of your website. Not sure if your website falls into the simple, moderate, or highly-complex range? Reach out and we’d be happy to take a look.