How Much Does a Website Redesign Cost? (An Honest Breakdown)
If you have spent any time researching how much a new website costs, you have probably run into the exact same frustrating answer from almost every agency: “It depends.”
While it is true that a custom digital platform has a lot of moving parts, hiding behind “it depends” does not help you budget, and it certainly does not build trust.
At Design the Planet we believe in transparency. In this guide for Louisiana businesses, we are breaking down the exact variables that drive website costs up, what helps keeps them down, and the actual price ranges you can expect when partnering with us to build a high-converting, Google and AI ranking, on-brand website.
What Drives Web Design Costs Up?
A website is more than a digital brochure; it is your 24/7 sales representative. When a web project pushes into higher investment tiers, it is typically driven by six main factors:
Custom Strategy and User Experience (UX)
Building a completely bespoke layout tailored to highly specific buyer journeys requires deep research, wireframing, and custom coding. For example, a heavy commercial contractor or an industrial service business requires a vastly different digital layout than a standard local retail shop.
Advanced Functionality and E-Commerce
Simple informational pages are straightforward. The cost increases when you introduce complex integrations—such as a heavily customized Shopify storefront with complex shipping matrices, interactive location maps for regional offices, secure client portals, or custom-built lead qualification calculators.
Related Topics:
Advanced SEO and AIO Architecture and Geographic Scope
Launching a website that ranks for a single service in one town is relatively simple. The complexity—and cost—scales up based on your growth goals. If you need a site structured to rank for multiple distinct services across several cities or states (e.g., building out dedicated, localized landing pages to capture search traffic across New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Metairie, Lafayette, or expanding regionally), it requires a massive amount of technical architecture, customized schema markup, and siloed URL structuring so search engines can properly index your footprint.
Full-Service Copywriting
A beautiful website will fail to convert if the words on the page do not connect with your buyers. If Design the Planet is tasked with interviewing your subject matter experts, conducting core keyword intent mapping, and writing every single line of high-converting website copy from scratch to ensure it ranks and sells, it requires a significant investment of specialized time and labor. Maybe a little less if we also us AI, but a SEO expert needs to oversee and make sure what AI is creating achieves all of the requirements necessary for SEO goals.
Professional On-Site Photograph
Stock photos can make a website look generic and instantly kill buyer trust. (Ex: You can’t have mountains in the background for a Louisiana home builder photo. People can’t we waring jackets – it just almost never happens in Louisiana. Smiling models are nice but seeing real team members in company uniforms is so much better.)Bringing a professional photographer out to capture authentic team headshots, your actual office environment, and real-world project or job sites adds creative direction, day-rates, and editing costs to the project. However, this unique visual asset library completely transforms your brand’s credibility.
Brand Videos
Video is the ultimate trust-builder because it allows prospects to look you in the eye before they ever call you. Integrating professional video production into your New Orleans website build—whether it’s a homepage brand story, specific service walk-throughs, or a video designed to answer your most common sales objections before a discovery call—requires scripting, filming, and extensive post-production editing. This increases the upfront launch investment but creates a website that pre-closes leads for your sales team.
Domestic vs. Offshore Talent or both (and Fair American Wages)
You can easily find cheap web design by working with agencies that outsource all of their labor to overseas freelancers in low-cost-of-living countries. Some companies in Louisiana are out there selling web design and development at medium to high prices and they outsource 100% while you pay full price. We don’t do that. Our strategy, design, and development teams are mostly Louisiana-based—with a deep footprint right here in Metairie, Kenner, Covington and New Orleans. We do have 2 team members who are full time but are remote. When you hire us, you are paying for accessible, English-speaking experts who understand the local culture (We speak Yat), operate in your time zone, and are paid competitive American wages. Local accountability costs more than offshore middle-men, but it drastically reduces communication errors and project delays.
Deep Expertise and Proven Track Record
You aren’t paying for a green freelancer to learn how to build a website on your dime. A significant driver of a website’s cost is the caliber of the minds building it. Our agency brings decades of hard-earned experience to the table, led by a founder who has personally developed and launched over 800 websites. That level of institutional knowledge means we already know what mistakes to avoid, how to build stable technical architectures that last for years, and exactly what design patterns turn local traffic into actual paying customers. You are paying for certainty, speed, and a proven playbook.
What Keeps Web Design Costs Down?
If you are working with a leaner budget, there are very practical ways to control the scope of your project without sacrificing the quality of the end product:
Utilizing a Structured Baseline Design
Instead of coding a completely blank canvas from scratch, starting with a highly optimized, pre-structured design framework allows the agency to focus on your branding, messaging, and conversions rather than expensive custom development hours.
Providing Finalized Assets and Brand Guideline
You can save a significant amount of project time (and money) by handing over a clean, high-resolution library of your brand assets up front. This includes finalized logos, official brand guidelines, approved fonts, and professional on-site photography or video assets.
Opting for a Phased Rollout
You do not have to launch a 50-page website on day one. A highly effective strategy is to launch a lean, high-performing “Phase 1” website featuring your core services and primary landing pages first. Once that site is live and generating local leads, we can, and do, systematically build out secondary pages, resources, and deeper content over time.
Why is Design the Planet a little more expensive?
There are many ways to plan, design, develop and launch a website and that is not the same for every web development company.
Here are some of the reasons Design the Planet may be more expensive than others in the market:
Websites are all custom made. Design the Planet doesn’t use templates. All of our sites are planned, designed and developed from scratch. We believe every business has its own brand and identity and we shouldn’t try to shoehorn your company into a template that was originally designed for another company. All of our websites are built from scratch and this process takes longer. It is also proven to help your website last longer, perform better on search, and represent your brand more professionally.
Experienced people working on your project. Adrienne and Rob Folse have been developing websites for local and national companies for over 25 years. If Design the Planet accepts you as a client Rob and Adrienne will be working on your project team.
Proven process. Design the Planet has a step-by-step process for website development. The process customized to each clients needs and goals.
Why are some other website design companies cheaper?
- All team members are outsourced. We know of a few agencies in the region who do outsource 100% of their website design, development and content work to other countries. When you outsource your labor to a country where the average hourly rate is half of what is paid in the US then you can charge cheaper rates.
- Templates are being used. Some agencies or freelances will utilize templates to make the process go faster.
- Lack of experience. Some agencies are newer to the market and they don’t fully know what they are doing. This group is probably the most dangerous to hire. They may be talented designers, but they don’t know how to plan and build a quality website, and they normally don’t know anything about SEO or AIO. Or you may have a person who knows about coding a website but doesn’t know how to visually represent a brand online.
- AI generated websites. Cheaper sure, but better? Not yet. While AI may in deeded be generating all websites in the future they are still in their infancy. We have seen many pretty AI websites that have poor SEO or they don’t really represent the brand. Many of the sites are missing important information but you may not know that until later when you wonder why you don’t get the conversion you want.
What People Say About Us
Our Real Web Design Price Ranges
To give you a realistic idea of what to budget, we categorize our web design projects into three clear tiers based on complexity, functionality, and business goals.
Tier 1
Growth-Focused Small Business Websites
- Estimated Investment:
$7,000 – $14,000 - Who it is for: Established local service providers, contractors, and businesses looking to dominate their local market with a clean, professional, and fast-loading digital footprint.
- What’s included: Core informational architecture (typically 5 to 10 pages), mobile-responsive optimization, local SEO technical foundation, essential lead capture forms, and an easy-to-use content management system (CMS) so your internal team can make quick updates.
Tier 2
Premium & Conversion-Optimized Platforms
- Estimated Investment: $15,000 – $25,000
- Who it is for: Mid-market companies, multi-location brands, and businesses looking to aggressively scale their lead generation and stand out as the definitive market leader in their region.
- What’s included: Full custom UX/UI layout, deep competitor and local keyword analysis, advanced lead-capture tracking, advanced SEO and AIO content additions, dedicated conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy, and foundational integrations with your internal CRM systems or scheduling software.
Tier 3
Advanced E-Commerce & Larger Businesses with Goals to 5x or 10x their Company Quickly
- Estimated Investment: $25,000 – $50,000+
- Who it is for: Brands requiring robust e-commerce capabilities (e.g., custom Shopify setups with complex product catalogs or regional shipping rules), Larger Brands who are working to expand rapidly and need extensive branding as well as SEO/AIO to reach their growth goals, or extensive custom software integrations.
- What’s included: Advanced product filtering, custom checkout flows, extensive backend data syncing, automated inventory management integrations, premium security protocols, and full-scale copywriting and SEO, aggressive AIO/GEO, sales funnels and content mapping.
And even after all of this information – as Adrienne likes to say “There is more than one way to skin the alligator.” Some of our clients pay for their websites up front, others pay over 6 months, some pay over 2 years. Some make the investment as part of a larger marketing effort and their website is value prices as part of a much larger project.
Why Choose a Transparent Agency?
We don’t hide our pricing because we want to work with clients who view their website as a revenue-generating asset, not a line-item expense. If your goal is simply to find the cheapest possible option, we likely aren’t the right fit—and that is perfectly okay. But if you want a strategic partner, (someone local who knows what they are doing and will answer the phone) to build a platform that turns traffic into actual local or regional customers, we are ready to build it with you.
Why Wait? Let’s Build Something Amazing Together!
