In Canada, a website in English and French can open your business to millions more customers, and for many organizations it's a requirement. But there's more than one way to make a website bilingual, and the option you choose affects your budget, how professional your site looks and whether the French version can be found on Google. Here's how the main approaches compare.
Why build a bilingual website?
- Reach more customers. French is the first language of millions of Canadians, including Acadian and francophone communities right here in the Maritimes.
- Welcome visitors. For tourism businesses, festivals and attractions, a French website is part of good hospitality.
- Meet requirements. Government bodies, many organizations that receive public funding and businesses selling to customers in Quebec may be required to provide French content. Check the requirements that apply to you.
- Build trust. Content in someone's first language shows that you value their business.
Option 1: Automatic machine translation
Plugins like GTranslate can translate your whole website automatically, often in seconds and at a low cost. They're a quick way to offer basic access in many languages.
But machine translation has real limits:
- Names and terms get translated. Place names, brand names and product names can be "translated" into something else entirely, like a local landmark turning into the name of a different city.
- Tone suffers. Marketing copy, puns and calls to action rarely translate word for word.
- It may be invisible to Google. Many free plans translate pages in the visitor's browser, so search engines never see the French version and it won't show up in French search results.
If you use automatic translation, add brand and place names to the plugin's "do not translate" list and choose a plan that creates real, indexable translated pages.
Option 2: Professional translation
With a multilingual plugin like WPML or Polylang, each page has a proper French version with its own address (for example /fr/), written or reviewed by a professional translator. This costs more and takes longer, but you get accurate, natural French that reflects your brand, and pages Google can index and show to French-speaking searchers.
Option 3: A hybrid approach
For many businesses the best value is a mix: professionally translate your most important pages (home, services, booking and contact pages) and use machine translation, reviewed by a fluent speaker, for the rest. You get quality where it matters most without translating every blog post by hand.
How we do it: Lake Translate
For the websites we build, we developed our own translation plugin, Lake Translate, to get the speed of machine translation without giving up control. It uses Google's top-of-the-line translation APIs and supports dozens of languages, but unlike off-the-shelf plugins, it's built to be easy for you to work with:
- Real translated pages Google can find. Every language gets its own pages, like /fr/, so your French content can be indexed and show up in French search results, not just translated in the visitor's browser.
- Easy manual overrides. Spot a phrase that doesn't sound right, or a name that should never be translated? Fix it yourself in a few clicks, and your version sticks.
- Dozens of languages. Start with English and French and add more languages as your audience grows.
- Included at no extra cost on most websites. Lake Translate comes with most websites we build. Very large, content-heavy sites may have an additional cost, and we'll always tell you up front.
Lake Translate is only available on websites designed and built by Lake Design. Pair it with professional translation for your most important pages, and you get the hybrid approach above with far less effort.
Bilingual SEO tips
- Give each language its own URLs, like /fr/, rather than switching languages on the same page.
- Add hreflang tags so Google shows the right language to the right people. Good multilingual plugins do this for you.
- Translate your page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text, not just the visible text.
- Research French keywords instead of translating English ones. People don't always search the way a direct translation would suggest.
- Make the language switcher easy to find on every page, including on mobile.
Which option is right for you?
If French speakers are a key audience, or you're required to offer French, invest in professional translation for your core pages. If you mainly want to offer basic access to international visitors, a well-configured machine translation tool can be enough, and if we're building your website, Lake Translate gives you that with easy manual control and French pages Google can index. Either way, plan it from the start of your project: adding a second language to a finished website is always harder.
We've built bilingual websites for clients like the Fall Flavours Food & Drink Festival, Canada's Food Island and Roma at Three Rivers, and a site in eight languages for Lobster PEI. Learn more about our websites for tourism, festivals and events and our web design services in PEI, or get in touch to talk about your bilingual website.
