The global economy is becoming a digital economy: within the last five years, business eCommerce sales in 43 countries grew by nearly 60%1. With online presence now an integral part of global business, web professionals — service providers, creators, and hosters — are now crucial to driving the global economy, supporting businesses in their establishment of reliable, functional and effective websites that drive customer engagement and build revenue.
This growth isn’t just driven by large enterprises; small and midsized businesses (SMBs) are also becoming increasingly digital. As of 2023, there were approximately 358 million SMBs worldwide2, representing 90% of global businesses. For web service providers, creators, and hosters, this presents a huge opportunity to set the stage for an exciting new period of growth, with the digitally-enabled SMB – accounting for roughly 50% of global GDP3 – driving the new global economy.
Helping SMBs to operate with greater speed, agility, and scale
85% of SMBs see digital technology as essential, and 77% increased their tech investments in 2024.4 However despite this growing appetite for digital services, SMBs don’t generally have large in-house teams to manage them. For web professionals this presents an opportunity to support the digital enablement of SMBs, going beyond simply just the establishment of a web presence to them continuously operate with greater speed, agility and scale in the digital arena.
In doing so, web professionals can build stronger, stickier relationships with SMB customers and extend the lifecycle of their engagement with them – moving beyond singular touchpoints, to recurring spend.
Web professionals can do this effectively by working with the complimentary partners that already sit within their ecosystem. In this web enablement ecosystem each connection — whether a hosting provider, web professional, or technology partner — offers up its own unique capabilities and strengths to the network, in turn fostering collective growth, cultivating healthy competition, and creating the opportunity for partners to build more holistic customer offerings.
The more actors and activities added, the more useful the network becomes to fulfilling multiple customer needs, and the more stable and resilient the ecosystem becomes as a whole.
Supporting SMBs through the web enablement ecosystem
WebPros is designed to help web professionals to fully harness the power of the web enablement ecosystem to support the digital growth of their SMB customers. Through using connections within the ecosystem, they can help SMBs to establish strong digital identities, quickly adapt to emerging market trends, improve their digital customer engagement, reduce their time to market, and build new revenue streams – in turn cultivating more demand from their service providers.
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, web professionals can use the power of the web enablement ecosystem to deliver the robust digital infrastructure and services their SMB customers need, while growing capabilities, driving future demand and cultivating sustained, collaborative innovation that benefits all parties. The future of the global economy is the digitally-empowered SMB, and behind them, the agile, resilient and innovative ecosystem that makes it possible.
1. ‘Digital Economy Report 2024’, UN Trade & Development, 2024.
2. Einar H. Dyvik, ‘Number of SMEs worldwide 2000-2023, STATISTA, 2024.
3. WorldBank.org, 2022.
4. Sage, “Small Business, Big opportunity” report 2024.