Website Redesign RFP: What to Include and a Template You Can Copy

A website redesign RFP is a request for proposal: a single document sent to several agencies that states the problem, the constraints and the rules of the selection, so that the quotes coming back are answers to the same question. That last part is where most of them fail. Five agencies read the same twelve pages, form five different pictures of the work, and send back numbers between €18,000 and €140,000. Those figures cannot be compared, because they are not priced against the same scope.

The fix is not a longer document. It is one that pins down the four things that actually move a quote: how many page templates exist, who writes the content, what has to connect to what, and what counts as done. Everything else is context, and context is cheap.

This is the structure we ask for when we respond to one, written from the receiving end.

An RFP costs real time on both sides. Two to four weeks to write it, three weeks for responses, one to two weeks to review them, which puts eight weeks between the decision to redesign and the first line of work. Below roughly €25,000 of project value that overhead is larger than the savings it produces, and a direct brief to two or three agencies gets you further faster.

Write one when at least two of these are true:

• The budget is above roughly €25,000, where a bad pick is expensive to unwind.
• Procurement or a board requires a documented selection.
• More than one department has to sign off, and you need their requirements written down before anyone starts designing.
• The site connects to systems that agencies must be able to work with: a CRM, an ERP, a booking engine, a customer portal.

Skip it and brief two or three agencies directly when:

• You have a straightforward corporate site under twenty pages.
• You already know which agency you want and the RFP would be theatre.
• You need to start in under a month. RFP cycles do not compress well.

In the second case, a shorter website design brief does the same work with a quarter of the effort. The brief describes the project; the RFP describes the project and the procurement rules around it.

Agencies read an RFP in a predictable order, and it is not the order most RFPs are written in. Scope, budget and deadline get read first, because together they decide whether to respond at all. Content ownership gets read fourth and quietly determines whether the schedule holds. Company history gets read last, if it gets read at all.

Write for that order. Put the decision-relevant material in the first four pages and the background after it.

Copy the eleven headings below into a document and fill them in. A website redesign RFP template that works tends to run eight to fifteen pages. Past twenty, agencies skim, and skimming produces the vague quotes you were trying to avoid.

1. Project summary. Three sentences. What you are redesigning, why now, and when it needs to be live. If a reader cannot repeat this back after one pass, rewrite it.

2. About the organisation. What you sell, to whom, in which markets and languages. Two paragraphs.

3. Current site and what is wrong with it. URL, platform, approximate page count, monthly traffic, and the specific problems. "Dated design" is not a problem statement. "Mobile conversion is 0.4% against 1.9% on desktop" is.

4. Goals and how you will measure them. Two or three, each with a current value, a target and a date. If you cannot state the current value, say so; that itself tells the agency you will need analytics work.

5. Audience. Who visits, what they came for, which devices, which languages. Include the internal audience if staff use the site to do their jobs.

6. Scope. The section that decides the price. List page templates rather than pages: home, service detail, case study, blog index, blog post, contact, careers, legal. Ten templates and two hundred pages cost far less than thirty templates and forty pages. Then list features, split into required and desirable.

7. Content. State plainly who writes the new copy, who supplies photography, and whether existing content is migrating as is. If the answer is "the agency", say so and expect the quote to rise by a third.

8. Technical requirements. Hosting, systems to integrate, single sign-on, accessibility level, performance targets, data residency, security review. Name the specific systems, not the categories, and name the standard rather than the aspiration: WCAG 2.2 level AA is a requirement an agency can price, while "accessible" is not. The same applies to speed. Google's Core Web Vitals thresholds treat a Largest Contentful Paint above 2.5 seconds as needing improvement, so write the number and the device class you expect it on.

9. Budget and timeline. A range and a target launch date, with any fixed dates that cannot move.

10. Selection process. Response deadline, format, page limit, presentation round, decision date, and the criteria with their weights. Give one named contact for questions and one deadline for asking them.

11. Terms. Ownership of design files and code, payment schedule, warranty period, what happens if you cancel. Attach your contract template if you have one, because a surprise legal review after selection can add a month.

The most common instruction we see is a blank where the budget should be, on the theory that naming a number invites agencies to spend all of it. The reasoning is understandable and the result is the opposite of what you wanted. Every respondent guesses instead, the guesses scatter, and you end up comparing quotes that were never priced against the same assumptions.

In practice that means one response at €22,000 and one at €95,000 for the same brief. You learn nothing from the spread and spend two weeks in follow-up calls establishing the range you could have written on page one.

A range solves it without giving anything away. "Between €40,000 and €60,000, and we will consider proposals outside that range if the reasoning is clear" lets an agency shape a realistic scope, and it tells you something useful when someone comes back at €110,000: either they see work you have not scoped, or they misread it. Both are worth knowing before you shortlist.

If you genuinely do not know what the work costs, published ranges are a reasonable starting point. Our breakdown of website redesign costs gives the bands we see in the European market by project size.

Decide the weights before the proposals arrive, ideally before the RFP goes out, and write them into the document itself. Scoring after you have read the responses is how the most polished deck wins rather than the closest fit, because by then you are rationalising a preference you already formed. Publishing the weights also raises the quality of what you receive: agencies write to the criteria they can see.

A workable split for a mid-size redesign is below. Adjust the numbers, but keep price under half. An RFP scored mostly on price does not need the other ten sections.

One signal is worth more than the whole deck: whether the proposal pushes back on anything. An agency that accepts every requirement without comment has either not read the RFP closely or has decided to raise the issues after signing. The proposals that question a deadline, flag a missing integration or point out that your content plan is optimistic are the ones written by people who have delivered this before.

Ask for references from the last twelve months and call them. Ask one question: what went wrong, and how was it handled? Every project has an answer. A reference who cannot produce one has not worked with them on anything difficult.

The two words get used interchangeably in conversation, and they sit at opposite ends of the same exchange. Knowing which one you are writing settles most arguments about what belongs in it, because the RFP is the question and the proposal is the answer. One is identical for every recipient; the other should be different every time.

You write the RFP. It states the problem, the constraints and the rules of the selection. It is the same document for every recipient, which is what makes the responses comparable.

The agency writes the proposal. It states the solution, the process, the team and the price. A website redesign proposal that arrives without a scope table or an assumptions list is not finished, and asking for both is reasonable.

A middle form is worth knowing about. If your requirements are still forming, an RFI, a request for information, asks a short set of questions of a wider group without demanding a full costed response. It costs agencies an hour instead of two days, so more of them reply, and you can write a sharper RFP afterwards. This works well when you are unsure whether the project needs a platform migration at all, a question our website redesign guide covers in more depth.

Six patterns account for most of the disappointing response rounds we see, and all six are decided by a sentence or two in the RFP rather than by anything the agencies do. They are cheap to fix while the document is still a draft and expensive to fix afterwards, because the only remedy once responses are in is to reissue and lose three weeks.

Sending it to ten agencies. Response quality drops as the recipient list grows, because good agencies triage. Four to six is the range where you get considered answers. Above that, you get templates.

Listing features without priority. When everything is required, nothing is, and the quote comes back at the top of every assumption. Split the list into required and desirable and be honest about which is which.

Leaving the content owner unnamed. Content is the most frequent reason redesigns slip, and it is decided in one sentence of the RFP. Name the owner and the deadline for the first draft.

Asking for free concept work. Speculative design in a proposal round tells you which agency had a junior available that week, not which one will do the strongest work. It also quietly excludes the ones with a full pipeline, which are usually the ones you want.

No question window. Without a stated deadline for questions and a shared answer document, you spend two weeks answering the same thing five times and the responses still differ.

Skipping the redirect plan. Almost no RFP mentions it, and it is the costliest omission after launch. According to Google Search Central, a site move with URL changes requires every old address to be mapped to its new one before the switch, and ranking recovery still takes weeks afterwards. Decide in the RFP whether that mapping is your job or theirs, or read what happens when nobody owns it in our guide to SEO during a redesign.

A good website redesign RFP is short, specific about scope, honest about budget, and clear about who writes the content. Those four properties produce quotes you can lay side by side. Everything else in the document is context that helps an agency write a warmer proposal but changes the number very little.

If you are about to send one, do a last pass with one question in mind: could a stranger price this without calling you? If the answer is no, the missing information is what your next paragraph should contain. Then send it to four agencies rather than ten, give them three weeks, and score against weights you wrote down before the first response arrived.