How to Calculate ROI on Your Website Redesign Project

How to Measure & Calculate ROI – Introduction

If you run a marketing department, you’re familiar with the hustle required to succeed, and needing to show results for your budget and effort. In this article, we show you how to calculate ROI on a website redesign investment.

We’re constantly talking to existing and prospective clients about potential projects and initiatives. A lot of questions are involved in this process, but there’s one question that we hear more than any other: how will this investment increase sales, decrease expenses, and overall make our business money? This data is otherwise referred to as the return-on-investment, or ROI.

In other words, if you were to spend $40,000 on a full website redesign project, how would you know if you’ve made a good investment that is actually delivering value?

There are many ways to calculate and understand the relative value of such an investment. This article aims to walk you through examples of calculable ROI in action so you can more easily analyze the opportunity of any prospective project.

1. Calculating Project Cost to Start

Before you can calculate ROI, you need to first understand the relative cost of your project. For full website redesign projects, average spend can be anywhere from $35,000 – $200,000. It’s important to note that you can find lower and higher estimates, but from our experience, a B2B website redesign project will fall into this range.

You may want to include near-term ongoing maintenance costs in your calculations as well. Depending on what agency you’re talking to, you may find that they have a lower initial cost but higher ongoing costs, or vice versa. Use common sense when trying to understand the true cost of the project over its projected lifetime.

Below, we’ve put together an equation to start from to help calculate these initial numbers.

ROI Equation

Base project cost + (Annual Maintenance Cost x Anticipated Project Lifetime) = Total Projected Cost

ROI Calculation Example

Let’s assume you invest $40,000 in a full website redesign project, and estimate a monthly $799 ($9,588 annually) investment for security, maintenance, and support. You also expect this site will last 5 years.

For simplicity, we’ll round up the one-time investment of this project plus some level of maintenance and ongoing improvements to $50,000. There’s your starting point.

2. Establish Universal Goals and Your Benchmarks

In order to determine the value of this investment, you next need to establish project goals to interpret where the value lies.

The most commonly and easily tracked goals include:

• Increased lead generation. For example, forms, phone calls, gated content, etc.
  • Hard conversions (SQLs): Those who are reaching out and raising their hand to work with you or inquiring to learn more. These leads go straight to your sales team to engage, and are pre-qualified by nature. You may use a tool like CallRail, Google Analytics, HubSpot, or another call tracking technology to track these leads more effectively.
  • Soft conversions (MQLs): Those who join your newsletter list at the top of the funnel. They may download a whitepaper, other gated content pieces, or may interact with value-added features like a calculator or find a rep feature. They’re likely qualified, but not ready to talk to sales. You will nurture them over time and they should be considered within a redesign to improve your marketing flywheel.
• Increased site engagement. This would include metrics like click-through rate, exit rate, pages per session, average session duration, time on each page, bounce rates, etc. These metrics generally support the two above, as well as sales and leads from other sources beyond your website.

Once your goals are established, it’s time to look at your current metrics. In order to compare future metrics and the success of a project, you’ll need to know how you’re performing now. How many visitors are you getting monthly? What number of qualified conversions are you receiving monthly? What’s your current bounce rate? You’ll most likely turn to Google Analytics (or perhaps Adobe Analytics or HubSpot Analytics) to review this basic benchmarking data.

Other tools, like heatmapping, may uncover additional opportunities to capture value. Hotjar is one very common heat mapping tool with a free version for those just starting out with that technology.

You will also probably turn to Google Search Console (or Bing Webmaster Tools) to review supplemental SEO data.

Third-party tools like SEMRush and other SEO tools will give you additional insight into ranking and competitive performance for both SEO and PPC. Most agencies you’ll talk to have some version of an SEO reporting tool they prefer, like SEMRush.

Example

We’ll consider the most important and quantifiable goals for this example as the number of hard conversions (form submissions and phone calls), and the number of soft conversions (those added to the newsletter list) monthly.

Let’s say you receive an average of 50 soft conversions (MQLs) and 10 hard conversions (SQLs) monthly. We’ll use the primary metric of 10 conversions monthly for the master equation below, though soft conversions could have their own close rate and value, which should then be included in the overall equation.

Now we have our initial project cost and benchmarks. We’re that much closer to our final equation.

3. Determine the Value of a Lead and Your Ability to Close It

We’re getting closer. Next, we must look at your average monthly leads and your team’s ability to close them. We’re going to call this your closing ratio. Using sales (forecasting) tools, your team can look at your closing ratio and the average deal size over a period of time.

Some companies may be able to project an average lifetime client value over time, which could be used to help represent the dollar value of a new client. It depends on your business model: if you sell larger, one-time or infrequent projects vs a greater volume of smaller or recurring deals.

You should look at a long enough time period to be representative of your average close rate and deal size. Tools like HubSpot or Salesforce have opportunity pipelines that track this data by default, but you can easily calculate from spreadsheets or other sales tracking tools.

There are other things to consider during this portion of developing your equation, as well. What if you could increase the number of leads to your website monthly? What if the website redesign process instills greater confidence in prospects that you can help them? What if your new positioning resonates better with the people you most want to work with, making them easier to find and faster to close? All of these things would positively impact this calculation in terms of the quality and number of leads.

Example

In this example, your business model is heavier on one-time project sales and less on the recurring or lifetime value of a client. Let’s say you close 20% of your leads on average. In this example, you’d expect to win 2/10 new leads from your website monthly on average.

Let’s also say your average deal size is $50,000 per new deal sold. This allows you to calculate today’s sales related to marketing efforts on your website to $100,000 per month.

4. Pulling It All Together: The Master Equation

At this point, we understand the facts of how much the project will cost and where we stand in terms of needed metrics and insight. We pull it all together with a larger, but still modifiable, equation. We recommend using this equation to create a few potential scenarios for your website redesign project. It’s a good idea to calculate multiple outcomes, like a conservative, middle and “shooting for the stars” performance lift scenario.

In general, we’d recommend being realistic with what is possible through a website redesign project, and would steer most clients to aim for a 10-20% lift in lead performance. This can be impacted through the addition of scope, SEO, positioning, messaging, and other feature level items that can be part of your overall project.

Equation

Today’s Benchmarks and Metrics Recapped

• Project Cost: $50,000
• Average Number of Monthly Website Leads (SQLs): 10
• Average Deal Value: $50,000
• Average Deal Close Rate: 20%

$50,000 deal value x 10 leads x .2 close rate = $100,000 Total Revenue Delivered Monthly From Current Site

Future Projections

• Scenario 1 Conservative: 10% Lift in SQLs
  • $100,000 x .1 = $10,000 Incremental Monthly Revenue
• Scenario 2 Moderate: 20% Lift in SQLs
  • $100,000 x .2 = $20,000 Incremental Monthly Revenue
• Scenario 3 Stretch Goal: 30% Lift in SQLs
  • $100,000 x .3 = $30,000 Incremental Monthly Revenue

Final Calculation

Let’s use the conservative projection of a 10% lift in performance.

With nearly $10,000 in incremental revenue delivered from the website monthly after undergoing a full website redesign project, you could see a full return-on-investment in just 5 months.

Most of our clients in B2B technical industries have longer sales cycles than this, but also much higher average deal values. If a $50,000 website helps you close just one more $500,000 deal per year, you’re already in a 10x ROI scenario within year one.

The additional soft conversions that you pull in each year build over time, increasing the likelihood of close in future years like a snowball effect.

5. Qualitative Factors That Influence ROI

The equations above give you a solid quantitative foundation — but not every factor that shapes your website’s return on investment fits neatly into a spreadsheet. Before diving into the broader considerations, it’s worth pausing on a few qualitative realities that can move the needle just as much as the math.

The power of one great lead. Sometimes the simplest way to frame the value of this investment is to ask: what would one more highly qualified, in-target lead mean for your business? Depending on your deal size, a single new client relationship could pay for the entire project — and then some. A site that speaks precisely to your ideal buyer, instills confidence, and makes it easy to reach out can create exactly that moment.

Harder-to-track, but real. There are additional benefits most small-to-mid-size businesses aren’t formally measuring yet, but that have genuine financial value:

• Improved brand perception and market positioning
• Reduced admin burden from a more manageable CMS
• Sales enablement — giving your team better tools to share, present, and close
• Marketing automation that nurtures leads without additional headcount
• Lower ongoing maintenance costs on a modern, stable platform

These qualitative factors become even more significant when you look beyond the core lead-gen equation — which is exactly what the following sections explore.

6. How to Account for the Cost of Inaction

Most ROI discussions focus on the expected return from a redesign — but there is an equally important question: what does it cost to do nothing? The cost of inaction is not a missed opportunity; it is an active drain on your pipeline. Every month your website underperforms, you are losing leads, weakening brand credibility, and making your sales team’s job harder.

You can quantify this using your existing benchmarks. If your site converts at 1% and the B2B average is 2–3%, you are forgoing half your potential leads monthly. A high bounce rate means your SEO and PPC spend is underperforming. A slow or non-mobile site actively suppresses your search rankings over time.

Reframing the project this way changes the leadership conversation from ‘should we spend this money’ to ‘can we afford not to.’ Additional hidden costs of delay include rising technical debt, growing security vulnerabilities, and falling further behind competitors who are investing in their digital presence.

7. Accounting for Longer B2B Sales Cycles

A common mistake when calculating website ROI for technical service companies is expecting results on a B2C timeline. In industrial, engineering, and life sciences markets, prospects may spend 6 to 18 months researching before reaching out. Your website may be delivering ROI the entire time — you just need the right framework to see it.

Standard last-touch attribution dramatically undervalues your site’s contribution. A buyer who downloaded a whitepaper eight months ago and just submitted a contact form today should not have that first interaction discounted. Use multi-touch attribution in HubSpot or Salesforce to credit the full buyer journey.

• Track micro-conversions — whitepaper downloads, newsletter signups, gated content views — as leading indicators of pipeline health.
• Evaluate website ROI over a 12–24 month window, not 90 days, and set this expectation with leadership upfront.
• Tag CRM opportunities that involved any website interaction so you can report pipeline contribution before deals close.

8. Tools and Technology for Ongoing ROI Tracking

Measuring website ROI is not a one-time exercise. You need a consistent technology stack that captures data at every stage of the buyer journey — from first visit to closed deal.

Prioritize GA4 and your CRM as the minimum viable stack. Add Forensics if ABM is a priority — for technical companies where a single enterprise deal can justify the entire website investment, knowing who is on your site before they convert is invaluable.

9. The ROI of UX and Accessibility Improvements

UX and accessibility improvements are often treated as cosmetic — but both have measurable, bottom-line impact on your website return on investment.

UX Improvements

• Page speed: A core Google ranking factor. Faster sites rank higher, reduce bounce rates, and keep prospects engaged longer.
• Mobile optimization: Most B2B buyers use mobile for initial research, even in technical industries. A non-responsive site signals a lack of modernity before any content is read.
• Navigation clarity: If a prospect can’t quickly find a product line, case study, or spec sheet, they leave. Streamlined IA directly increases pages per session and reduces key-page exit rates.

The Business Case for Accessibility

• Expanded reach: ~1 in 4 U.S. adults lives with a disability. An inaccessible site excludes a meaningful share of potential buyers and decision-makers.
• SEO lift: Accessibility best practices — descriptive alt text, logical heading structure, clear link text — also improve how search engines index your site.

Legal risk reduction: ADA accessibility lawsuits have increased significantly. Proactive WCAG 2.1 AA compliance reduces exposure, particularly in regulated industries.

10. Soft ROI: Employer Brand and Talent Acquisition

A modernized website speaks to candidates as much as buyers. For technical industries facing skilled labor shortages, attracting top engineering and technical talent is a genuine competitive advantage — yet this dimension of website ROI for technical service companies is almost never included in standard projections.

Candidates research employers as rigorously as buyers research vendors. A dated site can disqualify you before a single interview. Conversely, a modern site with a compelling careers section works as a 24/7 recruiting tool.

The financial impact is real: hiring a skilled technical employee costs $20,000–$50,000 or more in recruiter fees and onboarding time. If a stronger employer brand reduces time-to-fill on even two or three roles per year, the savings are material. When building your ROI case for leadership, a conservative recruiting efficiency estimate meaningfully strengthens the argument — especially for companies actively scaling their teams.

11. How to Present the ROI Case to Leadership and Finance

The analysis is done. Now comes the step that determines whether the project gets approved: translating your findings into language that resonates with decision-makers. CFOs and CEOs think in payback periods and risk — not traffic and bounce rates.

• Lead with payback period. ‘We recover the full investment in 5 months of incremental revenue’ is more compelling to finance than a three-year ROI figure.
• Show scenario analysis. Conservative, moderate, and stretch projections with clear assumptions demonstrate rigor and let leadership choose the scenario they trust.
• Price the delay. ‘Every month we defer costs approximately $X in forgone revenue’ makes inaction feel like a decision, not a default.
• Acknowledge downside risk. What is the minimum outcome that still justifies the investment? Addressing this proactively builds credibility.

One-Page ROI Summary Structure

Not Sure Where Your Website ROI Stands? Start Here.

Understanding the ROI of your website is one thing — knowing exactly what to do about it is another. If you’re not ready for a full redesign but want a clear-eyed view of where your digital marketing is leaving money on the table, Windmill’s Digital Marketing Strategy Quick Start was built for exactly that situation.

In 4–6 weeks, you’ll get:

• Actionable advice on what to fix first on your website
• A prioritized 3-6 month digital marketing roadmap — for you to execute, us to execute, or both
• A holistic review covering SEO, PPC, UX, content, and analytics — benchmarked against your KPIs
• Access to senior strategists who understand the realities of small marketing teams in technical industries

No lengthy retainers. No fluff. Just a focused, practical plan you can act on immediately.

Learn more about the Digital Marketing Strategy Quick Start →