WordPress development for businesses in Japan

Why WordPress is a common choice in Japan

WordPress is widely used in Japan for company sites, clinics, schools, real estate agents and owned media. Staff can edit pages without a developer, and there is a large local community of themes, plugins and hosting providers. The risks are familiar too: heavy page builders, unmaintained plugins and sites that slow down after a year of additions.

We build custom or lightly modified themes on a clean base, keep plugins to a short reviewed list and give your team a simple way to edit content. The aim is a site your staff can run without calling us each time.

What we set up for Japanese sites

WooCommerce for Japanese stores

WooCommerce suits shops that want full control of the code and hosting. For Japan we configure prices with consumption tax included, 10% standard and 8% reduced where it applies, shipping zones by prefecture and Japanese checkout fields. Payment plugins depend on the provider. Cards, konbini payment and PayPay are available through gateways that support Japan, and fees and rules change, so we confirm current terms with the provider you pick.

If the catalog is large or the team wants a hosted platform, Shopify development for Japan may fit better. We will recommend the lighter option, not the bigger project.

Security, privacy and updates

A WordPress site that is not updated becomes a target. We set up automatic backups, limit admin accounts, add two-factor login and keep plugin count low. Our WordPress security checklist lists the checks. For privacy, the site must describe its cookies, analytics and forms in a policy that matches APPI, the Japanese data protection law overseen by the Personal Information Protection Commission. Check wording with your lawyer.

After launch we can handle updates and monitoring under the website maintenance service, billed at $30 an hour or under a monthly arrangement from the quote.

How the project runs

1. Call and quoteA short call in your afternoon. Japan is 3.5 hours ahead of India, so 11:00 in Pune is 14:30 in Tokyo.
2. Design and content structurePage types, menus and editor workflow agreed before build.
3. Build on stagingWeekly demos on a private link, with feedback in writing.
4. Launch and handoverYou own the hosting, domain and admin accounts. We avoid launches during Golden Week and year-end closures.

Migrating an older Japanese site

Many Japanese company sites are several years old, built on an earlier WordPress version or a custom system. Moving them safely is a project in itself. We start with a crawl of the current site, a list of URLs that bring traffic and a record of the titles and descriptions in Japanese, so nothing is lost by accident.

• Keep URLs the same where possible. Where they must change, we build a one-to-one 301 redirect map, including Japanese URLs that appear percent-encoded in logs.
• Check text encoding. Older databases and CSV exports sometimes hold Shift_JIS or EUC-JP content, which must be converted to UTF-8 to avoid garbled characters.
• Preserve forms, thank-you pages and tracking so conversion data stays continuous.
• Resubmit the sitemap in Search Console and watch indexing for several weeks.

For a design change on top of the move, see website redesign for Japan.

Price

Projects start at $1,500, with a rate of $30 an hour and a fixed quote after the call on the contact page. Pages, custom features, WooCommerce and migration from an older site move the price. The WordPress website cost guide explains typical ranges, and our general WordPress development page covers the method.