How Much Should a Website Cost a Louisiana Local Business?

If you've asked around, you've heard everything from "$0 — just use Wix" to "$15,000, sites are an investment." Both answers are hiding something. Here's the honest breakdown we give owners in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and everywhere in between.

The three real options (and their real costs)

DIY builders ($0–40/month). Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. The subscription is cheap; your time is not. Most owners spend 20–40 hours fighting templates, and the result usually reads "did it myself" to customers — which matters when a $6,000 AC replacement is on the line. Fine for a brand-new side hustle. Risky for a business that lives on trust.

Freelancers ($500–3,000). Quality is a lottery. Some are excellent. The common failure isn't the build — it's the after: the freelancer disappears, the site breaks, nobody has the passwords. If you go this route, get the logins in writing on day one.

Agencies ($3,000–15,000+). You're paying for process, strategy, and accountability. For most local service businesses, the extra zero buys things you may not need — brand workshops, custom illustration, stakeholder meetings.

The honest middle: a done-for-you site built specifically for local businesses typically runs $700–2,500, with a small monthly care plan if you want someone watching it. That's the space we work in, so yes — we're biased. But the range holds across the market.

What actually drives the price

• Number of pages — a 5-page site and a 25-page site are different jobs.
• Content creation — writing your services, photos, and reviews into pages that sell takes real hours.
• Custom features — online booking, financing applications, service-area maps.
• Who owns the follow-through — updates, backups, security, and edits after launch.

Red flags that cost more than any invoice

• You don't own your own domain (check now — seriously).
• No mobile preview before you approve anything.
• "SEO included" with no specifics about what that means.
• Contracts that hold your site hostage if you leave.

The question that matters more than price

Not "what does it cost?" but "what does it return?" A site that books one extra service call a week pays for itself in the first month or two — and a beautiful site that doesn't make the phone ring is expensive at any price.

Want to see exactly what you'd get before spending a dollar? Walk through the client experience — every stage of a project, exactly as customers live it — or tell us about your business and we'll draft your site first.