WordPress & CMS Development Company in Berlin

Authoring complexity and monetisation surface are the real drivers on a Berlin editorial WordPress budget. The tiers are a scoped editorial WordPress build on WP Engine Germany at Berlin agency standards over eight to fourteen weeks, including a Gutenberg block library, ACF schemas, BFSG-aligned WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, full UTF-8 umlaut handling, TTDSG-compliant consent with Usercentrics or Cookiebot, and a GDPR Article 30 Verfahrensverzeichnis, a publisher-grade build at Axel Springer adjacent or Welt-vertical scale with multi-brand authoring, paywall and metering integration, ad-tech complexity, and full BFSG conformance documentation, or headless WordPress with Storyblok or Sanity and a Next.js front end. Berlin rates sit above Leipzig or Hamburg for agency talent because of the IBM iX, Mtek3, and Edenspiekermann benchmark. We give fixed-fee proposals, not open T and M.

The Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG) — the German Accessibility Strengthening Act — takes effect on 28 June 2025 and transposes the European Accessibility Act (EAA) into German law. For the first time, private-sector e-commerce, banking, e-books, transport ticketing, and consumer-facing digital services must meet WCAG 2.1 AA, with enforcement by the Marktüberwachungsbehörde and fines of up to €100,000 per violation. This is the biggest change to the German web in a decade, larger in operational impact than GDPR for many B2C operators. Our WordPress builds ship against WCAG 2.1 AA with EN 301 549 layered on top, axe-core in CI, manual NVDA and JAWS testing, a published Erklärung zur Barrierefreiheit (accessibility statement), and a feedback mechanism that meets the Act's requirements. We avoid overlay widgets — German disability advocacy groups and the Marktüberwachungsbehörde will not accept them as defence.

The Telekommunikation-Telemedien-Datenschutz-Gesetz (TTDSG), in force since 1 December 2021, is the strictest EU implementation of the ePrivacy Directive's cookie and telemedia rules. It requires informed, granular opt-in consent before any non-essential storage or access on the user's device — including Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, and most marketing tags. The Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit (BlnBDI) has been active on enforcement. Our WordPress builds ship with Usercentrics (Munich-based, dominant in DACH), Cookiebot, or Borlabs Cookie configured to gate every non-essential script with a server-side or client-side allowlist. We audit the rendered page against the TTDSG before launch and again 30 days post-launch. Generic US cookie banners that fire GTM on page load are a TTDSG finding, and we will not ship them.

The EU AI Act, in force from 1 August 2024 with staged obligations through 2025 and 2026, classifies AI systems by risk (prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk, minimal-risk) and imposes transparency, conformity assessment, and risk management obligations. For most Berlin WordPress sites the practical impact is on plugins and blocks that use generative AI for content generation, automated content scoring, behavioural personalisation, or biometric inference. Any AI-generated image or text published on a WordPress site falls under the Act's transparency requirements (Article 50) from 2 August 2026, which means clear disclosure to the reader. Our discovery phase runs an EU AI Act surface scan on every plugin and block, removes or replaces non-compliant components, and adds the transparency labelling required for AI-generated content. We coordinate with the client's data protection officer because BfDI and BlnBDI guidance overlaps.

Yes. We ship inside the headless and hybrid WordPress patterns that Axel Springer settled on after its long migration off legacy stacks: WordPress as the editorial authoring layer for adjacent and commercial brands, headless front ends on Next.js or in-house React stacks, Storyblok for marketing and event microsites, and edge caching on Cloudflare Frankfurt or Fastly Frankfurt. We are not the systems integrator for Bild or Welt's tier-one editorial — that work sits with Axel Springer's internal platform team and historically IBM iX, Mtek3, and other named agency partners. We are the right partner for Axel Springer-adjacent brands, Welt-vertical commercial properties, and the Mittelstand and SaaS clients that want to learn from those public migration patterns without paying tier-one agency rates.

Our WordPress GDPR and BDSG baseline includes a GDPR Article 30 Verfahrensverzeichnis (record of processing) for every form, comment, paywall, and tracking surface, with the BDSG-specific overlay around employee data (BDSG §26) and special-category data (BDSG aligned with Article 9 GDPR). We map data flows including third-country transfers post-Schrems II with Standard Contractual Clauses and Transfer Impact Assessments where US-based plugins or CDNs are in scope. WP Engine Germany, Kinsta DE, and Hetzner all sit inside the EU which simplifies the residency question. Our incident playbook follows GDPR Article 33 (72-hour notification to the BfDI or relevant Landesbeauftragte) and Article 34 (notification to data subjects where applicable). We coordinate with the client's external or internal Datenschutzbeauftragter as part of every launch.

We ship UTF-8 end-to-end with no fallback transliteration. WordPress slugs handle ä, ö, ü, ß, and Eszett correctly when the database collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci or utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci (which is the modern default on MariaDB and MySQL 8). We test against real Berlin and DACH client content — Welt, Süddeutsche, Größe, Straße, Müller, Schöne, ÖPNV — across slugs, meta titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, JSON-LD structured data, RSS feeds, Apple News feeds, and email previews. RankMath and Yoast both handle umlauts cleanly on current versions, and we audit the rendered page and the feed XML before launch. For sites with legacy ASCII-only slugs we either keep the existing slugs with 301 redirects to umlaut-correct canonical URLs, or migrate slugs to umlaut form with a full redirect map — depending on what the SEO baseline supports.

Yes. TYPO3 is still common in German higher education and Mittelstand, Drupal sits in some Berlin Senate and federal-adjacent properties, and Pimcore appears in DACH manufacturing and PIM-heavy estates. Migration scope typically covers schema mapping (TYPO3 TCA tables and Drupal entity field definitions both have quirks), URL preservation with 301 chains validated against Search Console for de-DE plus en variants, image and asset transfer with WebP and AVIF reprocessing, editorial workflow recreation, and a side-by-side cutover with a feature-flagged percentage rollout. For multilingual estates we move to Polylang or WPML with de-DE as the source locale. Migration cost scales with archive size, language coverage, and how much of the source CMS's custom business logic needs replatforming.