Bilingual website: how to do it right
Translating the copy is the easy part and the least useful. Here is what actually decides whether your English version works or merely exists.
Many Mexican companies need a site in two languages: those selling to a foreign parent company, those receiving international tourism, and those selling directly into the United States market. Almost all of them solve it the same way: they commission a translation and paste it over the existing site.
The result is usually an English site nobody finds and that, when found, does not convince. Not because the translation is bad, but because translating solves the language and solves neither the search nor the arguments. This guide explains the difference and what has to be built.
Translating is not localizing
A translator changes the words while preserving meaning. That is fine for a document and insufficient for a commercial site, because your English-speaking audience does not have the same questions as your Spanish-speaking one.
A concrete example: a Mexican client landing on your site already knows how invoicing works, what VAT is, and how a transfer is made. An American client needs to know how to pay from their country, in what currency, whether there is a contract, who is accountable if something goes wrong, and how the process works remotely. None of that appears by translating the Spanish site, because it was not there to begin with.
Localizing means writing the English version from that audience’s questions. Sometimes it overlaps 80% with the Spanish version. Sometimes they are different sections entirely.
URL structure: three options and one recommendation
Each language needs its own address. Content that swaps with a button while the URL stays the same is the fastest way for Google never to index your English version, because as far as it is concerned there is one page.
- Subfolder (
yoursite.com/en/). The recommended option for most: it inherits the main domain’s authority, is cheap to maintain, and is easy to configure. - Subdomain (
en.yoursite.com). It works, but Google treats it as a partially independent site, so you start building authority nearly from zero. - Country-specific domains (
yoursite.com.mxandyoursite.com). Only makes sense if you will operate as two separate businesses, with separate content and strategy. For almost everyone it is more work than it is worth.
Hreflang: what it is and why it breaks so often
Hreflang tags tell Google “this page has an equivalent version in this other language, here it is”. Without them Google may show the Spanish version to someone searching in English, or treat both versions as duplicate content.
The rule most often broken is reciprocity: if the Spanish page points to the English one, the English one has to point back. If the link goes one way only, Google ignores the whole declaration. It is also worth declaring an x-default indicating which version to serve anyone who matches none of the listed languages.
And a practical warning: hreflang tags have to point at URLs that exist and return 200. A hreflang pointing at a page that no longer exists invalidates the set, and it is a silent error that can sit unnoticed for months.
The detail that annoys visitors most
Automatic redirection by location. It is tempting and it is a bad idea: a Mexican who wants to read in English cannot, an American on a VPN ends up in Spanish, and Google’s crawler —which almost always arrives from the United States— can get stuck seeing only one version.
The right approach is detecting browser language to suggest, not to force: show a discreet notice offering the other version and let the person decide. The language switcher should also lead to the equivalent page rather than the homepage. Always dumping people at the home page is one of the most common frustrations of bilingual sites.
The real cost of maintaining it
A bilingual site does not cost double in development; it costs roughly double in content, and that cost does not end on launch day. Every post, every new service, and every price change has to be published twice, forever.
So it is worth deciding scope honestly before starting. If your international client only needs to understand what you do and how to reach you, a five-section English version done well outperforms a full mirror of the site that will be out of date in six months. And if you sell to nobody outside Mexico, do not do it: it is permanent work in exchange for nothing.