Website developer for Japan: corporate, recruitment and bilingual sites for all 47 prefectures

Who builds your website, and which Japanese projects we suit

BtechWaleTech is a three-person engineering team in India. One of us is the full stack developer who writes the front end, the back end and every integration on your site. Another of us covers deployment, AWS, data, technical SEO, and AI and machine learning, so the person who plans your redirects is also the person who launches the site. The third of us leads project delivery and also handles data science, AI and automation work. Those three people answer your messages and write your code. Nobody sells the project to you and then hands it to a subcontractor.

Some things we are not, stated plainly so you can judge the fit before we talk:

• No office in Japan. We have no Tokyo address, no registered 株式会社 (kabushiki kaisha), no local staff and no virtual office. Every project is remote.
• English is our working language. We do not write natural Japanese. Your Japanese copy is written or checked by you, a bilingual colleague or a translator, and we build everything around it.
• No in-person meetings. Work happens on WhatsApp, email and video calls, with a staging link you can open from anywhere.
• No borrowed credibility. You will not find Japanese client logos, testimonials, awards or partner badges on this page, because we would not be able to back them up. Judge us on live work we show you and on a small first milestone.
• No ranking promises. We build sites that search engines can crawl and understand; we do not guarantee positions.

The projects that suit us best in Japan are those where English is already part of the working day, or where a bilingual person sits on your side: Japanese subsidiaries of overseas companies that need a site both head office and local customers can read; international startups in Tokyo, Fukuoka and Osaka; hotels, ryokan and tour operators courting overseas guests; manufacturers and food producers looking for buyers abroad; and small Japanese firms that want a modern, fast site without Tokyo agency rates and have someone who can follow English messages with a translation tool.

We suit you less well if you need a partner who attends meetings at your office, writes persuasive Japanese sales copy, photographs your factory or qualifies for subsidy funding. In those cases a Japanese Web制作会社 (web production company) is the better choice, and we would rather say so now than halfway through a project. For the wider picture of how we work with Japanese businesses on websites, apps, automation and software, see our Japan page.

Websites we build for businesses in Japan

Corporate websites (コーポレートサイト). The site a Japanese buyer, bank, job applicant or journalist checks before they contact you. We build it around the pages Japanese visitors expect, covered in detail below, on a fast static stack or on WordPress if your team publishes often. Our general build approach is described on the web development service page.

Recruitment sites (採用サイト). Hiring is hard across Japan, and applicants compare employers on their phones in the evening. A separate recruitment site, or a recruitment section with its own look, gives room for job details, working conditions, staff interviews and an application form short enough to finish on a train.

Landing pages (ランディングページ, usually shortened to LP). Single pages for a campaign, a product launch, a seminar or an advertising keyword. Japanese landing pages are often long and image-heavy; we keep that persuasive structure but build it with real text instead of giant images, so the page loads fast, can be read by search engines and can be edited without redrawing banners.

Ecommerce storefronts. Shopify, WooCommerce or custom storefronts for brands selling to Japanese consumers, with tax-inclusive prices, the Specified Commercial Transactions Act page, delivery date selection and payment methods such as cards including JCB, konbini payment and bank transfer. METI puts Japan's consumer ecommerce market at ¥26.1 trillion for 2024, 5.1 percent higher than the year before, and many brands now run their own store next to their Rakuten and Amazon listings.

Multilingual and inbound tourism sites. Japanese plus English, Chinese and Korean versions for hotels, ryokan, restaurants, experience providers and exporters, with language switchers, hreflang tags and booking links that work for visitors paying with overseas cards.

WordPress and headless builds. Custom WordPress themes without page-builder bloat, or a headless CMS feeding a static front end, when editors need a friendly admin screen but the public site must stay fast and secure.

Renewals and migrations (リニューアル). Rebuilding an outdated site, including moves away from Wix, Jimdo, STUDIO or an old WordPress theme, with a URL redirect map so search traffic survives the change.

When a website becomes something bigger. If the site needs a booking system, member area or ordering portal, it turns into a web application, covered on our software development page for Japan. Mobile apps are on the Android and iOS developer page for Japan, with our general approach on the Android and iOS app service page, and automations such as sending form enquiries into kintone or a LINE Official Account are on the AI automation engineer page.

How much a website costs in Japan in 2026, compared with our prices

Japanese businesses usually collect several quotes (相見積もり) before choosing a web production company, so here is the context those quotes sit in. The figures below are taken from price guides that Japanese agencies and comparison sites, including Web幹事, システム幹事 and 発注ラウンジ, published in 2026 based on quotes from Japanese production companies. They are market ranges, not a quote from any one company, and real projects vary with scope. Our figures are starting prices in US dollars with yen at about ¥155 per dollar.

Reading the Japanese ranges. The spread inside each range is mostly about who does the thinking. The low end is usually a template filled with your own text; the middle adds original design, a CMS and some copywriting; the top adds marketing strategy, customer interviews, photography and lead-generation design. The same page count can therefore cost ¥300,000 or ¥1,500,000 depending on how much planning and writing the agency does for you.

Reading our figures. Our starting prices cover design and development of a clearly scoped first version using content you supply. They do not include Japanese copywriting, translation or photography, which you can buy directly from specialists. For a like-for-like comparison, set our quote against the part of a Japanese quote that covers design, build, forms and technical SEO, then add what you would pay a translator or copywriter.

Where the gap is small. Basic maintenance is the one area where Japanese plans can come close to ours. Server-and-backup plans at ¥5,000 to ¥30,000 a month are common, and our plan from US$120/mo (about ¥19,000/mo) sits within that band. The difference is what is inside: ours includes content updates, fixes and security work, which Japanese agencies more often price in the ¥20,000 to ¥50,000 band. Compare the contents of each plan, not only the monthly figure.

What our website starting prices buy, and why they are lower

A starting price is only useful if you know what it covers. These are the plans that matter for a website project in Japan, what a typical first version includes, and what pushes a quote above the starting figure.

• Static website, from US$150 (about ¥23,000): up to 100 pages built from reusable templates, such as a clinic, law office, manufacturer or school site with a top page, services, company profile, access, news, recruitment and contact pages. Includes responsive design, Japanese font setup, a contact form with furigana and postal code lookup, basic SEO tags, a sitemap and deployment.
• SEO website, from US$300 (about ¥47,000): a structured site of 299+ pages planned around search demand, for example a page for each station and ward for a real estate agency, or for each product category and material for an industrial distributor. Includes keyword planning, templates, schema, internal linking and indexing checks. Search strategy is covered on our SEO services page for Japan.
• Ecommerce storefront, from US$750 (about ¥116,000): product and collection pages, cart and checkout with Japanese payment methods, delivery date and time slot options, tax-inclusive pricing, the Specified Commercial Transactions Act page and basic order management.
• Maintenance, from US$120/mo (about ¥19,000/mo): content changes, fixes, updates, backups and speed checks, with the first two months after launch free.
• Monthly SEO, from US$150/mo (about ¥23,000/mo): ongoing technical work, content planning with your native writer and monthly reports, for sites that need to grow search traffic after launch.

Why our prices are lower. A Japanese quote pays for an office in Tokyo or Osaka, salaried directors, designers and sales staff, and in much of the IT industry a multi-layer subcontracting chain (多重下請け), where the company you sign with passes the build to another company that may pass it on again. Each layer adds its margin and another round of communication. Our side of the ledger is short: three engineers working from India, no rented office, no sales staff and nobody further down a subcontracting chain. We also reuse tested components for forms, fonts, SEO and deployment instead of starting from zero each time. That is where the saving comes from, not from skipping testing or care.

What raises a quote. Many unique page designs, several languages, animation-heavy layouts, a CMS with custom fields and user roles, migration of hundreds of old posts, integrations with booking or core systems, and short deadlines. What keeps it down: approved text and photos, one person who makes decisions, and a first version that can grow later. The full plan list and scope notes are on the pricing page.

Japanese website conventions: trust pages done right

Japanese visitors, especially B2B buyers and job applicants, judge a company by a predictable set of pages. Missing or thin versions of those pages cost enquiries, and foreign website templates rarely include them. We plan them into every Japanese corporate site from the first sitemap.

• Company profile (会社概要): legal name, the representative's name and title, date of establishment, capital, number of employees, address, phone, business activities and, where you are comfortable sharing them, main banks, business partners, licences and memberships. We lay it out as a clean two-column table that reads well on phones and mark it up with Organization structured data.
• Message from the representative (代表挨拶): a signed message from the president with a real photograph. It carries more weight in Japan than a mission statement, so it deserves a proper layout rather than a paragraph squeezed under the profile.
• Company history (沿革): a dated timeline of founding, relocations, new branches and milestones. A long history is a genuine trust signal in Japan, and we can show Japanese era years alongside Western years where you want them.
• Access (アクセス): the address, an embedded map, walking minutes from the nearest station exit, bus routes, parking and a photo of the building entrance. For offices in large buildings, the floor and reception instructions matter too.
• News (お知らせ): dated announcements such as holiday closures, new services and media coverage. A news list updated this year tells visitors the company is active; one frozen three years ago says the opposite, so we make posting quick and easy.
• Recruitment (採用情報): at minimum a page with open positions and working conditions, and often a full recruitment site.
• Privacy policy (プライバシーポリシー): purposes of use for personal information and a contact point for enquiries, written or approved by your adviser.
• Contact (お問い合わせ): a form, a phone number with business hours and, for many consumer businesses, a LINE button. LY Corporation reports more than 100 million people in Japan using LINE each month, and many customers would rather send a message than call.

Density and design. Japanese consumer sites often show more information per screen than Western ones: banners, campaign dates, prices and badges side by side. B2B sites tend to be calmer. We agree the level of density with you, then keep it readable with a clear type scale, generous line height for Japanese text and consistent spacing, and we design the phone layout first because that is where most visitors arrive.

Details that signal care. Consistent full-width punctuation in Japanese text, correct price formatting such as ¥110,000 (税込, tax included), phone numbers that can be tapped on a mobile, a footer with the company name and copyright, and no stray untranslated English in buttons or error messages. Visitors rarely notice these details when they are right, and almost always notice when they are wrong.

Japanese contact forms and entry form optimisation (EFO)

The contact form is where a Japanese website either earns an enquiry or loses it. Japanese marketers call the work of reducing form abandonment 入力フォーム最適化, entry form optimisation or EFO, and specialist tools are sold just for it. Most of the gains, though, come from getting the Japanese basics right in the form itself, which is part of every site we build.

• Name fields in Japanese order. Family name then given name, as two fields or one with clear guidance, followed by a furigana field (フリガナ) so staff can read the name correctly on the phone. We accept both katakana and hiragana, or convert one to the other if your back office needs a single format.
• Postal code lookup. Typing a seven-digit postal code fills in the prefecture, city and town automatically from Japan Post's postal code data, and the visitor only adds the block number, building and room. This alone removes most of the address typing on a phone.
• Full-width and half-width normalisation. Japanese keyboards switch easily between full-width (全角) and half-width (半角) characters, so visitors type numbers like ０９０ or even email addresses in full-width without noticing. We convert the input quietly instead of rejecting it, and turn half-width katakana into full-width where your systems need it.
• Phone numbers with or without hyphens. 03-1234-5678, 0312345678 and mobile numbers starting 090, 080 or 070 are all accepted and stored in one consistent format.
• Correct autocomplete attributes. Browser autofill for family name, given name, postal code, prefecture and city works only when fields carry the right HTML autocomplete values, and it saves many taps on iPhone and Android.
• Clear required marks and inline errors. A visible 必須 (required) label, optional fields marked as optional, and error messages beside the field in plain Japanese supplied by your team, shown as the visitor types rather than after pressing send.
• A confirmation screen where it helps. Many Japanese business forms show a confirmation screen (確認画面) before sending. It reassures older visitors and B2B users, although it adds a step, so we build it where your audience expects it and leave it out where speed matters more.
• A reply that arrives. Auto-reply emails are sent from your authenticated domain so they reach addresses at Japanese mobile carriers, and the thank-you page says how quickly you will respond.

We also keep forms short. Every extra field, such as fax number, department or "how did you hear about us", costs completions, so we ask which fields your team actually uses. For a first B2B enquiry, company name, contact details and a free-text box are usually enough. Personal information collected through the form is limited to what you need under the APPI, and submissions can be routed to email, Chatwork, Slack or Microsoft Teams. If you want enquiries to create records in kintone or trigger a follow-up message automatically, that becomes a small automation, described on our AI automation page for Japan.

Choosing a CMS in Japan: WordPress, Japanese tools, site builders or a static site

WordPress is the CMS behind a very large share of Japanese business websites; W3Techs reported in 2019 that it held over 80 percent of the CMS market among Japanese-language sites, and much of the Japanese web industry, from production companies to shared hosts, is organised around it. It is a sensible choice when several people publish news, columns or job openings every week and want a familiar editor. Its weakness is upkeep: themes, plugins and PHP need regular updates, and neglected WordPress sites are a common target for attacks. If you choose WordPress, budget for maintenance from the first day.

Japan also has tools you will rarely meet elsewhere. Movable Type, now developed by Six Apart in Japan, is still found on some corporate and public sector sites; a-blog cms, made by a Nagoya company, has a following among Japanese web agencies; and Studio (often written STUDIO) is a Japanese no-code site builder popular with designers. microCMS, a Japanese headless CMS from a Tokyo company, keeps content in an admin screen with a Japanese interface and delivers it to a separate front end through an API, which lets editors work comfortably while developers keep the public site fast. If your team already uses one of them, we look at whether keeping it or moving serves you better before recommending anything.

When a static site wins. For most small and mid-sized businesses the site changes a few times a month: a news post, a new job opening, updated prices. A static site built with Astro or a similar framework serves ready-made HTML from a CDN, so there is no database to break into, no plugins to update and very little to slow it down. Hosting costs are close to zero and speed on phones is excellent. When editors need a friendly interface, we connect a headless CMS so staff can publish news without touching code while the public site stays static.

When WordPress wins. Content-heavy sites with several editors, a blog published every week, features that depend on specific plugins, or an in-house team already trained on it. We build lean custom themes, keep the plugin list short, and set up automatic backups and updates on a Japanese host or a cloud server.

When to leave a site builder. Wix, Jimdo and STUDIO are good for getting started, and some businesses should stay on them. Moving makes sense when you need faster pages, full control of SEO, a proper bilingual structure, custom forms or integrations the builder cannot handle, or when monthly fees for add-on features keep growing. The honest test is simple: if the builder does everything you need and the site brings in enquiries, keep it.

• Static site, optionally with a headless CMS: fastest, most secure and cheapest to run; the best fit for corporate sites, recruitment sites and landing pages.
• WordPress: the most familiar editing experience and a huge plugin choice, in exchange for ongoing updates.
• A Japanese CMS or builder already in place: keep it if it works; we can improve speed, forms and SEO within it or plan a clean move when it no longer fits.

Fast Japanese websites: Core Web Vitals and Japanese fonts

Speed problems on Japanese sites usually start with fonts and images. A Latin font holds a few hundred characters; a Japanese font covers thousands of kanji, kana and symbols, so a complete web font file can run to several megabytes. Load two weights of Noto Sans JP carelessly and the text may appear late or jump when the font arrives, which hurts Google's Core Web Vitals and, more importantly, the visitor.

Google measures three things: Largest Contentful Paint (how quickly the main content appears, good at 2.5 seconds or less), Interaction to Next Paint (how quickly the page responds to a tap, good at 200 milliseconds or less) and Cumulative Layout Shift (how much the layout jumps, good at 0.1 or less). We check them in real-user field data in Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, not only in a lab test on a fast office connection.

• System fonts first. Hiragino Sans on iPhone and Mac and Yu Gothic or Meiryo on Windows are already installed and look good. For many corporate sites they are the right choice and cost zero bytes.
• Subset web fonts when the brand needs them. Google Fonts delivers Japanese fonts in small slices split by Unicode range, so browsers download only the characters a page uses. For self-hosted brand fonts we create subsets for headings, which use few distinct characters, and keep system fonts for body text.
• Fallbacks tuned to avoid jumps. We set font-display and match fallback font metrics, so the switch from a system font to the web font does not shift the layout.
• Text, not pictures of text. Japanese banners and landing pages often put headlines inside images. Real text is lighter, sharper on high-density screens, readable by search engines and screen readers, and editable by your staff.
• Modern images at the right size. AVIF or WebP files sized for each screen, with width and height set so nothing jumps while loading, and lazy loading for images further down the page.
• Few third-party scripts. Chat widgets, heatmaps, several ad tags and social embeds add up quickly. Each one can also be an external transmission under Japan's Telecommunications Business Act rules, so we keep only the tools you actually use.

We test on mid-range Android phones over throttled mobile connections as well as on iPhones, because a site that feels instant on office fibre in Marunouchi can crawl on a rural train line. Japanese text also needs its own typography care: comfortable line height, no fake italics, and line-breaking rules (禁則処理) so closing punctuation never starts a line. Speed and clean structure support search visibility, which our SEO services build on after launch.

Website renewal without losing rankings: URL mapping, redirects and migrations

In Japan a website redesign is called a renewal (リニューアル), and many companies go through one every few years. The most common way a renewal goes wrong is not the design. It is changing URLs without redirects, dropping pages that quietly brought in traffic, or launching with a staging setting that tells search engines not to index the site. All three are avoidable with a disciplined checklist.

• Inventory before design. We crawl the current site and export the pages with clicks and impressions from Search Console, plus pages that other sites link to. Pages that bring visitors are kept, merged or improved, never deleted by accident.
• A redirect map. A spreadsheet listing every old URL and its new URL, including old WordPress addresses such as ?p=123, category and tag archives, PDF brochures and images that other sites link to, and URLs generated by site builders.
• Permanent 301 redirects. Each old URL redirects in one step to the most relevant new page, not to the home page, and chains of redirects from earlier renewals are flattened.
• Content parity. Titles, headings and main text on important pages move across without losing the words people searched for, and structured data is kept or added.
• Launch day checks. Remove noindex tags and staging passwords, submit the new XML sitemap, test redirects in bulk, and check canonical tags, forms, analytics and Search Console verification.
• The weeks after launch. We watch 404 errors, indexing and traffic for key pages and fix gaps quickly. Redirects stay in place long term; we recommend keeping them permanently where the host allows.

Moving from Wix, Jimdo or STUDIO. Hosted builders generally do not hand over a design you can install elsewhere, so the design is rebuilt and the content moved page by page, or by export where the platform allows it. Builder URLs often follow the platform's own patterns, and blog posts may sit under paths the new site will not reproduce, so the redirect map matters even more. Your domain stays with you; we point it to the new host only after you approve the site on staging, which keeps any interruption short.

Moving from an old WordPress theme. Old themes built with heavy page builders and dozens of plugins are often slower and harder to secure than a fresh build. We export posts, pages and media, clean up the HTML, and either rebuild on a lean WordPress theme or move the content into a static site with a headless CMS. Shortcodes left over from old plugins are converted, not left on the page as broken text.

Changing domain at the same time. If you move from an old domain to a new .co.jp or .com, Search Console's change of address tool helps Google understand the move once redirects are in place. Even so, we advise changing as little as possible at once, because a new design, new URLs and a new domain together make any problem harder to diagnose.

Bilingual Japanese and English website architecture

Many businesses in Japan must serve two audiences well at once: Japanese customers and staff, and overseas buyers, head offices, investors or visitors. Visitor numbers make the case: JNTO recorded 42.68 million international arrivals in 2025, a new high, against 36.87 million in 2024, and the three biggest source markets were South Korea, mainland China and Taiwan. For hospitality and retail, the second language is therefore often Korean or Chinese rather than English. Getting the structure right at the start costs far less than retrofitting it later.

• One domain, language folders. We usually recommend paths such as /ja/ and /en/, or Japanese at the root and English under /en/, on one domain, so the authority each language earns helps the other. Separate domains make sense only for genuinely separate businesses or markets.
• hreflang and x-default. Each page declares its language versions with hreflang tags, including zh-Hans, zh-Hant and ko where used, plus an x-default for visitors who match none, so Google shows the right version in each market.
• No forced redirects by location. Visitors and search engine crawlers must be able to reach every language. A banner suggesting the other language is fine; an automatic redirect based on IP address is not.
• A switcher that lands on the same page. Switching from the Japanese access page should open the English access page, not the English home page.
• Correct lang attributes and fonts per language. Japanese, Chinese and Korean share many characters but draw some of them differently, so marking each language properly lets browsers pick the right font.
• Content written for each audience. English readers need different things from Japanese readers: how to reach you from the airport, how tax is shown in prices, which overseas cards you accept. We plan pages per audience, not only per language.

We build the multilingual structure, forms and publishing workflow; the translations themselves come from native translators or your bilingual staff. Text is stored in structured files or a CMS with one field per language, so translators can work without breaking layouts, and every page is checked after the Japanese text goes in, because Japanese and English lines differ so much in length. For search strategy in each language, including Chinese and Korean keywords, see our Japan SEO page.

Website development across Japan: all 8 regions and 47 prefectures

We build websites for businesses in every prefecture, remotely from India. The notes below describe what websites typically need to do in each part of Japan, based on the local economy and the kind of customers businesses there are trying to reach. We have no office in any of these places and claim no local clients there.

Wherever you are, the working method is identical: the same written scope, staging link and working hours. What changes is the content strategy, such as station-based access pages in Kanto and Kansai, cool-delivery options for food producers in Hokkaido and Tohoku, English capability pages for manufacturers in Chubu and Chugoku, or fast, simple lodging pages for pilgrimage routes in Shikoku.

Websites for Tokyo and Japan's 20 designated cities

Much of Japan's commercial activity is concentrated in Tokyo's 23 special wards and the 20 designated cities (政令指定都市), and each has its own mix of website needs. The table notes what websites in each city most often have to do. Every one of them, and every town in between, is served remotely.

Beyond the designated cities, regional centres such as Kanazawa, Matsuyama, Takamatsu, Kagoshima and Naha have their own clusters of family businesses, clinics and tourism operators, and in smaller towns a well-built website is often a producer's only shop window to the rest of Japan. For apps, automation and software alongside your website in any of these cities, see IT services in Japan.

Rules a Japanese website must follow: APPI, accessibility, pricing and online stores

This section is practical groundwork, not legal advice. We are engineers; for formal questions about your obligations, speak to a lawyer or another qualified adviser in Japan. These are the rules that most often shape how a Japanese website is built.

• Personal information (APPI). Under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (個人情報保護法), a site that collects names, emails or phone numbers needs published purposes of use, secure storage and sensible access control. Our forms collect only the fields you need and link to your privacy policy.
• An offshore team and your data. Suppose our engineers in India can see personal data stored by your site. Under the APPI, that counts as handing data to a third party located in a foreign country, which normally requires either the individual's consent, given after they are informed about the destination country and its data protection rules, or a recipient that maintains a protection system equivalent to the APPI's standards. India's own law, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, is coming into force in stages. We minimise our access, test with dummy data and sign data-handling terms; your adviser decides the legal basis.
• Accessibility. JIS X 8341-3 is Japan's web accessibility standard and is aligned with WCAG: the current 2016 edition has the same success criteria as WCAG 2.0, and a revision following WCAG 2.2 is being prepared. From April 2024, an amendment to the Act for Eliminating Discrimination against Persons with Disabilities turned reasonable accommodation from a best-effort duty into an obligation for private businesses. Our working target is WCAG 2.2 level AA: contrast, keyboard use, focus states, labelled fields, alt text, captions for key videos and layouts that survive zooming.
• Tax-inclusive prices. Consumer-facing prices have had to be displayed tax-inclusive since April 2021; the standard consumption tax rate is 10 percent, and most food is taxed at a reduced 8 percent. Price tables, menus and product pages are built to show the tax-inclusive figure clearly.
• Online stores. The Specified Commercial Transactions Act (特定商取引法) requires a page with seller details, prices, delivery, payment and returns information, and since June 2022 it also sets rules for the final confirmation screen before an order. We build both into every storefront.
• Advertising claims and stealth marketing. Stealth marketing, meaning advertising disguised as independent opinion, became a regulated misleading representation under the Premiums and Representations Act (景品表示法) in October 2023. Testimonials, influencer content and "No.1" claims on your site should be real, sourced and labelled where they are advertising. We leave room for evidence notes and never invent reviews.
• External transmission. Since June 2023, the Telecommunications Business Act has required certain online services to disclose what user information their tags and SDKs send to third parties. Many corporate sites that promote the company's own business are out of scope, but stores and information services may not be. If yours is covered, we add a disclosure page listing each tool.

Invoices and records. Japan has run a qualified invoice system since October 2023, and since January 2024 the Electronic Books Maintenance Act has required electronic transaction records to be kept electronically. That matters for stores that email receipts and for companies that receive our invoices. Our own position: we have no qualified invoice issuer registration in Japan, so our invoices carry no Japanese consumption tax, and the correct treatment on your side is for your tax accountant to confirm. We are also not a registered IT support provider for Japan's IT adoption subsidies, so our work is not subsidy-eligible.

Hosting and domains for Japanese websites: Xserver, Sakura, Tokyo cloud regions, .jp and .co.jp

Where a website is hosted matters less than how it is built, but it still affects speed, cost and who can maintain it later. For businesses in Japan we choose between three set-ups.

• A CDN for static sites. Static pages are served from edge servers in Japan and around the world, so a visitor in Sapporo, Naha or Seoul gets the same quick response. Many static hosts have free or low-cost tiers for small sites, and there is no server to patch.
• A Japanese shared host for WordPress. Xserver, Sakura Internet and similar Japanese hosts are popular, support customers in Japanese, bill in yen and handle most WordPress sites comfortably. If your site already lives there, we can keep it there.
• Cloud regions in Tokyo and Osaka. Each of the three big clouds, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, operates a Tokyo region and an Osaka region. Larger sites, headless CMS back ends and sites whose forms store data in a database fit here, with backups kept in the second region.

Domains. Registering a .jp name requires a postal address in Japan, while .co.jp is reserved for companies registered in Japan and allows only one per company. That is one more reason the domain should be registered by your company, in its name, through a registrar you control. We then set the DNS records, SSL certificate and redirects from www or older domains. Foreign companies without a Japanese entity can use a .com with a /ja/ section, which works well for search.

Email authentication. Form notifications and auto-replies need SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on your domain, or they may land in spam, particularly at Japanese mobile carrier addresses and large webmail providers. We configure these at launch and send through a transactional email service rather than from the web server itself.

Running costs. Domain renewal, hosting, CMS subscriptions, paid themes or fonts and email services are paid by you directly to each provider. We list the expected monthly and yearly costs in the quote, so nothing surprises you after launch. For systems that need servers and databases in Japan beyond a website, see software development in Japan.

What to prepare before hiring a website developer

A Japanese web production company often spends its first weeks on hearing sessions (ヒアリング) and planning documents. With a remote team, a little preparation on your side replaces most of that and shortens the whole project. None of it needs to be perfect; a rough version is enough for an accurate quote.

• A one-paragraph brief: what the business does, who the site is for, and the one action you want visitors to take, such as calling, booking or requesting a quote.
• A draft sitemap: a list of the pages you think you need. We will refine it, but it shows the scope quickly.
• Reference sites: three to five sites you like, Japanese or foreign, with a note on what you like about each. Competitor sites you want to outdo are useful too.
• Content ownership: who writes the Japanese text and the English text, and whether you need a translator or copywriter. Settle this early; it is the most common cause of delay.
• Photos and logo: original logo files and photos you own or have licensed, including the office, team, products and representative. Half a day with a local photographer often transforms a site.
• Accounts and access: logins for your domain registrar, current hosting, Google Search Console, analytics and Google Business Profile, all in your company's name.
• Decision process: who approves design and text, and whether the president or another department must sign off. We build their review time into the schedule.
• Budget and date: a realistic range and any fixed launch date, such as the start of the fiscal year in April or an upcoming trade show.

Share whatever you have ready on WhatsApp or through the contact page. Our reply starts with questions and ends with a written scope, a timeline and an itemised quote. If the project also needs an app, automation or ongoing SEO, the overview of everything we offer to businesses in Japan is on IT services in Japan.

Working hours across Japan and India on a website project

Japan runs three and a half hours ahead of India all year, since neither country observes daylight saving time. Our 9 am to 9 pm day in India translates to 12:30 pm until 12:30 am in Japan, and we are on WhatsApp every day of the week.

For a website project that rhythm works well. Your team reviews the staging site in the morning and sends comments before lunch; we pick them up when we come online at 12:30 pm JST, and most text, layout and form changes are on staging by your evening. Design reviews and launch calls fit into the Japanese afternoon. If your president or a department head can only meet in the morning, we arrange a call around 10 am JST in advance.

DNS switches for a launch are scheduled for quiet hours in Japan, usually late evening JST within our working day, so any transition happens while few customers are browsing. Everything agreed on a call is summarised in writing afterwards, which also helps colleagues who read English through a translation tool.

Hiring an offshore website developer from Japan: a buying guide and red flags

Japan is short of engineers; the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has projected a shortfall of as many as 790,000 IT workers by 2030, and overseas developers are one way businesses fill the gap. Offshore website projects go wrong in familiar ways, though, and most of them can be prevented before anything is signed. Put these questions to any provider, including us.

• Who exactly builds the site? Ask for names and speak to those people before signing. If the salesperson cannot introduce the developer, expect the work to be subcontracted.
• How is the language gap bridged? Agree who on your side reads English, or who translates. Large offshore firms use a bridge engineer; small projects need a named bilingual contact instead.
• Is there a written scope? Page list, templates, languages, forms, CMS, SEO setup, redirects, rounds of revisions, who supplies text and photos, and what is excluded.
• Can you see real, live work? Open their sites on your phone over mobile data, send a test enquiry and run a page through PageSpeed Insights. Screenshots prove little.
• Do they know Japanese details? Ask how they handle furigana, postal code lookup, full-width input, Japanese fonts and line breaking. Vague answers are a warning.
• Who owns the accounts? Domain, hosting, CMS, analytics and Search Console must be in your company's name from the start.
• What happens to your old URLs? For a renewal, ask to see the redirect map before launch day.
• How are payments staged? An advance, a payment on design approval and the balance before launch is fair. Full payment upfront is not.
• What about personal data? Ask who will be able to read form submissions, and how the provider deals with the APPI's rules for sending data to third parties abroad.

Red flags: a promise of top rankings (上位表示保証); your domain sitting in the developer's own account; a price with no page list behind it; reviews or logos you cannot trace to a real client; a Tokyo address that turns out to be a mail drop; themes or plugins from unofficial download sites; and a deadline invented to hurry your decision.

When to choose a Japanese agency instead: when you need meetings in Japanese at your office, Japanese copywriting and photography bundled into the price, a registered provider for subsidy funding, or a vendor who can be on site within hours. If that describes your project, we will tell you so.