“Our company spent 30,000 yuan building an official website three years ago, but it hasn’t been updated since. Even the product images are still from our startup days,” complained Zhang Lei, who runs a cross-border e-commerce business in Hangzhou. His predicament is not unique—the traditional model of enterprise website building, plagued by long cycles, high costs, and difficult maintenance, is being abandoned by a growing number of small and medium-sized businesses. In its place, a new generation of website-building tools centered on SaaS (Software as a Service) is rapidly penetrating industries such as catering, retail, and manufacturing, offering monthly fees of just a few hundred yuan, drag-and-drop operation, and one-click mobile adaptation.

Interviews conducted by this reporter reveal that since the second half of 2024, the domestic enterprise website-building market has undergone a structural reshuffle. Lightweight platforms represented by “上线了,” “凡科建站,” and “Alibaba Cloud · Quick Website Builder” have seen user registrations surge by over 30% on average. Chen, an electronics components dealer in Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei district, told reporters that he completed his company’s website through a SaaS platform last month, going from registration to launch in just two days. “Previously, hiring an outside agency meant spending a week just communicating requirements,” he said.

Behind this transformation lies the urgent need for digital marketing among micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s Q1 2025 SME Operations Report, over 62% of small and medium-sized enterprises have listed “online customer acquisition” as their primary business goal. As the “first business card” of an online presence, the efficiency and cost of enterprise website building directly determine the starting point of a company’s digital transformation. While traditional custom-built websites offer highly personalized designs, costs often run into tens of thousands of yuan, with development cycles of one to two months—deterring many small businesses with annual revenues below 5 million yuan.

“The core of lightweight enterprise website building is not feature stacking, but ‘minimum viability,’” said Li Wei, product manager of a leading SaaS website-building platform, in an interview. “We’ve observed that 80% of small and medium-sized businesses only need four modules: company introduction, product list, contact information, and online consultation. Rather than having users pay for features they won’t use, we focus on perfecting the basic experience.” She further revealed that the platform’s newly launched AI-powered color-matching feature reduces the design barrier to zero—users simply upload their logo, and the system automatically generates a full set of pages aligned with the brand’s identity.

However, lightweight solutions are not without concerns. Our investigation found that some low-cost SaaS website-building products fall short in areas such as data security, SEO optimization capabilities, and domain binding flexibility. An internet marketing consultant who spoke on condition of anonymity pointed out, “Many small platforms offer visually appealing templates, but the code is bloated, making it difficult for search engines to crawl. If a site is built but can’t be found, it’s as good as not built at all.” Additionally, once users stop renewing their subscriptions, the complexity of data migration poses a potential risk.

Industry observers believe that the future direction of enterprise website building will be “tiered services”: top-tier custom firms serving large groups, while lightweight SaaS platforms focus on MSMEs. But at the current stage, platforms must strike a balance between “speed” and “stability.” For example, Alibaba Cloud’s “Quick Website Builder” now includes an intelligent SEO diagnostic feature that provides real-time recommendations for optimizing titles, keywords, and descriptions—partially alleviating the search visibility issues associated with lightweight website building.

“Enterprise website building is not the destination, but the starting point of digital marketing,” concluded an industry expert at a recent China SME Digital Transformation Summit. With the maturation of AI-generated content (AIGC) technology, the future may even enable “one-sentence website generation”—where users simply state their industry and preferences, and the system automatically creates content and design. If this vision becomes reality, it will completely reshape the market landscape of enterprise website building.

As of press time, this reporter noted that internet giants including Baidu and Tencent have also begun laying out plans in the “intelligent website building” track. The shift from “heavy” to “light” in enterprise website building may have only just begun.