Do you need a Welsh language website? The law, the customers and the searches, county by county

You need a Welsh language website if you are a public body under the Welsh Language Standards, and you are usually asked for one if you deliver a public service under contract or hold a Welsh Government or lottery grant. You should have one if your customers are in Gwynedd, Ynys Môn, Ceredigion or Carmarthenshire, where between 40% and 64% of people speak Welsh. If you are a trade or a shop in Wrexham, Cardiff, Swansea or Newport, you can start in English and add Welsh where it earns its keep. The rest of this guide is the reasoning, so you can check it against your own business.

The law: who is bound

The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 gave Welsh official status in Wales and created the Welsh Language Commissioner, who imposes standards on public bodies through compliance notices. The standards that concern a website say that the text of every page must be available in Welsh, that every Welsh page must be fully functional, and that the Welsh language must not be treated less favourably than English. Councils, the national park authorities, health boards, universities and colleges, police and fire services and the Welsh Government are among the bodies bound, and the Commissioner can investigate a complaint and impose a civil penalty of up to £5,000.

A private business is not bound. Two things reach a private business anyway. A contract to deliver a public-facing service for a bound body normally passes the duty down, so a firm running a leisure centre or a helpline for a council is expected to meet the same test on the pages the public uses. And a grant from the Welsh Government, a council or the National Lottery Community Fund usually asks how the project will serve Welsh speakers, which for a website means the public-facing pages in both languages. Our page on charities and public bodies takes the duty in full.

The customers: county by county

The 2021 Census counted 538,300 people in Wales able to speak Welsh, 17.8% of everyone aged three and over, down from 19.0% in 2011. That average hides the geography. The figures below are the Census's own for the counties where the decision is clearest; elsewhere the share runs from about one in four in Conwy to around one in nine in Wrexham, Flintshire and Swansea.

Where two in three of your neighbours speak Welsh, an English-only site says something you did not mean to say, and a Welsh-first site with English one click away is a reason to choose you over the firm from over the border. Where one in nine does, the English pages carry the business and the Welsh is a courtesy that some customers will notice and reward.

The searches: smaller than you hope, and uncontested

Nearly every Welsh speaker also searches in English, and most do, so the English pages carry the traffic everywhere, including Caernarfon. Welsh-language searches exist: a few a month for a trade in a small town, more for accommodation, food and anything a Welsh-medium school or a council might buy. What makes them worth having is that almost nobody competes for them, so a Welsh page for a service in a town takes that search outright. A Welsh version is a bonus for rankings, not the reason to build one; the reason is the customer, or the law.

A layer or a full second site

1. Bound by standards, or asked by a contract or a grant: a full second site, every page, launched the same day as the English.
2. Customers mostly in Gwynedd, Ynys Môn, Ceredigion or Carmarthenshire: a full second site, and consider Welsh first.
3. A tourism business anywhere whose guests come from England: a Welsh layer, the welcome, the place names, the menu, the story, with the full site later if the guests turn out to be Welsh.
4. A trade or shop in the towns where one in nine speaks Welsh: English first, a Welsh layer, and the full site when a Welsh speaker joins the business or the Welsh searches show up in Search Console.

What a proper bilingual site has

A Welsh page for every English page at its own address, so it can be linked to and found. An hreflang pair on every page, so a Welsh search is shown the Welsh page. A switch on every page that opens the same page in the other language and remembers the choice. Welsh titles, descriptions, menus, forms, error messages and emails. Fonts that carry ŵ and ŷ. And a process that makes it impossible to change one language without the other. A translation widget provides none of these and fails a public body's test on the first page.

The cost logic

Translation is bought by the word, so the cost of a Welsh version follows the length of the English one, and it is a fraction of the cost of the English build because the design and the structure already exist. Three things bring it down: signing off the English before translating, so nothing is translated twice; a Welsh speaker in your own business writing the Welsh with a translator proofreading; and the Welsh Government's Helo Blod service, which translates up to 500 words a month free for businesses and charities, enough for signage, social posts and the odd new line. What it must never be is machine translation: Welsh speakers can tell, and it undoes the point.

The honest test: would a Welsh-speaking customer choosing between you and a competitor choose differently if your site were in Welsh? In Caernarfon, yes. For a council supplier, they have no choice and neither do you. In Newport, rarely, and the money is better spent on the English pages until that changes.