Multilingual website design for businesses that work in several languages

Ask about a multilingual site See the fixed prices

Who this is for

• Swiss firms that serve German-, French- and Italian-speaking regions, often with English for international clients.
• Belgian businesses that work in Dutch and French, and sometimes German and English.
• Businesses in Italy’s bilingual regions, such as South Tyrol (Italian and German) or the Aosta Valley (Italian and French).
• Malta businesses that speak English and Maltese to locals and Italian or other languages to visitors. There is a separate page for Malta.
• Any practice whose clients come from abroad: hotels, clinics, law and finance firms, schools and consultancies, where the website is often the first thing a new client reads.

What a multilingual site has to get right

Translating the text is the visible part. Most of the work that decides whether each language is found, and trusted, sits underneath:

• One URL per language, for example example.ch/de/, /fr/, /it/ and /en/, so each version can be indexed in its own right.
• hreflang tags on every page, with language and region codes where they matter (de-CH, fr-CH, it-CH) and an x-default, pointing both ways between every pair. One-way or missing pairs are the most common reason the wrong language shows up in search.
• A language switcher that keeps your place: it opens the same page in the other language, not the homepage, and names each language in its own words (Deutsch, Français, Italiano) rather than with flags, because a flag stands for a country and Switzerland alone has four languages.
• No forced redirects. Visitors are not bounced to a language based on where they seem to be; they choose, and the choice sticks. Search engines advise against automatic redirects for the same reason.
• Translated titles, descriptions, URLs, image text and share cards, not only the body text.
• Layouts that absorb longer text. German and French usually run longer than English, so buttons, menus and headings are designed to take it without breaking.
• Local details: dates, numbers and prices written the way each market expects, form labels and messages in each language, and a legal notice and privacy page per language where the law or your clients expect one. The legal wording comes from you or your lawyer; I build the pages.

Who writes the words

You do, or your translator does. I do not write or translate German, French, Italian or Dutch copy, and I would rather say so here than discover it halfway through a project. What I do is everything around the words: the structure, the pages, the switcher, the hreflang pairs, the titles and descriptions in each language, and a check of every page before launch. If you start from machine translation, have a native speaker review it first: on a business site, a clumsy sentence costs more trust than it saves time.

Why not a translation plugin or widget

A translate widget rewrites the page inside the visitor’s browser. Search engines see only the original language, so the translated versions cannot be found, and you have no control over the wording a client reads. Real pages per language are slower to set up and they are the only version that ranks. The same reasoning is on the Malta multilingual page.

Prices

Multi-language and multi-region support is built into the Tailored tier at 4,700 euro: an original design system, unlimited pages, advanced integrations such as Stripe, bookings or a CRM, 5 to 8 weeks of delivery, 3 rounds of revisions and 3 months of support after launch. For a One-Pager, Essential or Studio site, tell me which languages you need and I quote the extra pages. Every price is fixed and in euro, with 50% to start and 50% on launch. The homepage shows how these prices compare with typical European freelance and agency rates, and the prices page has every tier in one place.

After launch, care plans start at 100 euro a month for hosting, security updates, backups and an hour of changes; Growth at 225 euro adds four hours and a monthly performance and SEO review.

How a project runs

1. You tell me the markets, the languages and roughly which pages you need.
2. I reply within 2 working days with a fixed price and a delivery window.
3. You pick a theme from the catalogue as a starting point, or commission an original design.
4. I build the main language first, then each further language as its own set of pages from the translations you supply.
5. Before launch I check every page for its hreflang pairs, a working switcher and translated titles and descriptions, and hand over the Search Console setup.
6. You own the domain, the hosting account and the code, in every language.

See a second language done as a real page

This site has an Italian edition with its own address and hreflang tags linking it to the English homepage. It is a small example of the same structure a client site gets in every language.

Ask about a multilingual site About Kyle