A redesign looks like a design job and behaves like a migration job. The client sees a dated homepage. You see 140 indexed URLs, a blog nobody has touched since 2021, three contact forms feeding three different inboxes, and a plugin that broke the last time someone updated it. If the proposal only prices the new design, the old site will eat your margin.
This template is built around that reality. It opens with an audit of what exists, turns the findings into keep, merge and retire decisions, and only then scopes the new design and build. It also writes down who handles redirects, analytics continuity and launch-day checks, which are the tasks that get forgotten until traffic drops.
TL;DR
The website redesign proposal template covers replacing an existing site: a paid audit phase, content inventory with keep, merge and retire decisions, new design and build, content migration, a redirect map, and launch checks. Send it after you have looked at the current site's page count and CMS. The key practice is pricing migration separately from design, because a large blog archive can cost more than the new homepage.
What's inside
- Summary and goals: what is wrong with the current site and what the new one must improve.
- Current site snapshot: platform, page count, traffic sources, known problems.
- Phase 1 audit: content inventory, analytics review, technical crawl, stakeholder interviews.
- Content decisions: how pages will be kept, rewritten, merged or retired.
- Design and build: templates, functionality and platform for the new site.
- Migration plan: what moves, how it moves, and who moves it.
- Redirects and search protection: the redirect map, metadata carry-over and launch checks.
- Timeline, investment and acceptance: phases, payment schedule and signatures.
When to use it
Use this when the client has a live site that matters to them, even slightly. The signals are an established domain, a blog or resource section, any organic search traffic, or more than about 15 pages. It is also the right document for re-platforming, for example moving from one CMS to another, even when the visual design changes little.
Do not use it for a business with a one-page placeholder site and no traffic. That is effectively a new build, and the web design proposal is shorter and easier to sign. If the client only wants a visual refresh of a few templates on the same platform with the same URLs, you can also drop the migration and redirect sections from this template rather than switching documents.
The audit phase: why it is paid and what it produces
Clients sometimes push back on paying for an audit. The answer is that the audit is where the scope comes from. Without it you are pricing a site you have only seen from the outside.
A useful audit produces four things you can attach to the build phase:
- A content inventory. Every URL, its template, its traffic over the last 12 months, and inbound links if you have the data. Spreadsheets with a few hundred rows are normal.
- A decision per URL. Keep as is, rewrite, merge into another page, or retire with a redirect. The client signs off on this list before migration starts.
- A technical findings list. Broken links, slow templates, missing metadata, forms that do not deliver, plugins out of support.
- Baseline numbers. Traffic, conversions and page speed before launch, so you can compare after.
Price the audit as a fixed fee with its own deliverable. If the client walks away after phase 1, they still have a document worth paying for. If they continue, the audit fee can be part of the total rather than credited back, which keeps your scope honest.
Redirects, rankings and what you can promise
The fastest way to damage a redesign is to change URLs without redirects. The second fastest is launching with a staging setting that tells search engines not to index the site. Your proposal should list the protective steps you will take: a full redirect map from old to new URLs, carrying over page titles and descriptions for kept pages, submitting an updated sitemap, and checking the live site for blocked indexing on launch day.
What you should not do is promise that rankings will hold or improve. Search performance depends on factors outside your control. Write "steps to reduce the risk of traffic loss" and leave it there. If the client wants search growth as an outcome, that is a separate engagement, and an SEO proposal is the right vehicle.
Agree a monitoring window too. Watching 404 errors and traffic for 30 days after launch, and fixing missed redirects, is a common inclusion.
Customize it in your COLO workspace
Save this structure as a reusable proposal template in COLO Proposals, with the audit, design, build and migration phases as separate line items, each with its own rate, hours, tax or discount. The client reviews and accepts in the client portal, and an accepted proposal converts into an invoice for the first payment.
Migration work is a good candidate for time tracking even on a fixed fee. Track it against the project and you will know whether your per-page migration price was realistic next time.
Common mistakes
- Quoting migration by guess. Count the URLs first. "Approximately 50 pages" that turns out to be 400 posts is a loss.
- Letting the client skip the content decisions. Migrating everything as is often moves the old problems into the new design.
- No redirect owner. If the proposal does not name who builds and implements the map, nobody will.
- Forgetting the forms. Old forms often feed CRMs or inboxes the current team does not know about. Find them in the audit.
- Promising SEO results. Promise the process, not the ranking.
FAQ
Q: How is a website redesign proposal different from a new website proposal?
A redesign proposal has to account for what already exists. It adds a site audit, a content inventory, a decision on which pages to keep, merge or retire, a redirect map, and steps to protect current search traffic during the switch.
Q: Should I audit the current site before sending a redesign proposal?
Do a light audit before quoting so your scope is realistic, then include a deeper audit as the first paid phase. Quoting a redesign without looking at page count, CMS and traffic data is guessing.
Q: Who is responsible for redirects in a website redesign?
Put it in the proposal. Usually the designer or developer builds the redirect map from old URLs to new ones and implements it at launch, and the client confirms which old pages can be retired.
Q: Will a redesign hurt my client's search rankings?
It can if URLs change without redirects, content is dropped, or the launch blocks search engines by mistake. A redesign proposal should list the steps you take to reduce that risk, without promising rankings will hold. Run through a website launch checklist on launch day.
Q: How do I price content migration?
Count the pages and posts. Price manual migration per page or in bands, and quote automated imports separately. Old blog archives with hundreds of posts are often the largest hidden cost in a redesign. See how to scope a fixed-fee project for a method.