The Website Development Market | France

The website development market covers services for creating and improving websites. It includes a variety of professions, from web development itself to graphic design, user experience improvement, or database security. In 2017, the number of websites worldwide has exceeded 1.4 billion while merchant sites in Europe reached 645,000 according to the E-Commerce and Distance Selling Federation (Fédération du E-commerce et de la Vente A Distance - FEVAD). Currently, in France, we can distinguish between two main types of active service providers on the website development market:

• Website hosts which offer various options ranging from mutualized or shared hosting (the cheaper option) to so-called "turnkey" hosting, which allows a company to keep control over the content of its website;
• Web agencies which are either part of a communication group or are independent. They are aimed at customers in all sectors and offer a variety of services adapted to the size and needs of companies. They mainly rely on their expertise in terms of digital communication and marketing.
   

Despite the economic crisis and the poor figures posted by the media sector, the growth in the number of websites continues to accelerate. This study will focus in particular on the development of website creation by companies which is mainly based on the success of e-commerce and the development of the Internet on mobiles.

However, the website creation market is facing threats. In particular, we observe that the technological competence linked to websites creation has become more democratic, even trivialized.

In response to this evolution, providers must develop their expertise in marketing strategy and digital communication. They must also adapt their content to the use of mobile phones as a web browsing tool.