Do I need a bilingual website?

The three reasons, in order of force

The law first. The Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 lets the Welsh Language Commissioner impose standards on public bodies, and for a website those standards require the text of every page in Welsh, every Welsh page fully functional, and Welsh treated no less favourably than English. Councils, health boards, universities, national parks, police and fire services and the Welsh Government are bound. A private business is not. A supplier delivering a public-facing service under contract to a bound body is usually required by the contract to meet the same test, and a charity with public funding is usually asked by the grant.

The customers second. The 2021 Census counted 17.8% of people in Wales as Welsh speakers, but the figure is 64.4% in Gwynedd, 55.8% in Ynys Môn, 45.3% in Ceredigion and 39.9% in Carmarthenshire, and around one in nine in Wrexham, Cardiff and Swansea. Where your customers are two in three Welsh speakers, an English-only site says something you did not mean to say, and a Welsh-first site is a reason to choose you.

The searches third, and this one is smaller than people expect. Nearly every Welsh speaker also searches in English, so the English pages carry the traffic everywhere. Welsh-language searches exist, are few, and are almost never competed for, so a Welsh page takes them without a fight; it is a bonus, not the reason.

A layer or a whole second site

For a tourism business whose guests come from England, or a trade in a town where one in nine speaks Welsh, a Welsh layer does the job: the welcome, the place names spelt as the neighbours spell them, the menu, a sentence that says who you are. For the bound, the asked and the businesses in the Welsh-speaking counties, it is a full second site: a Welsh page for every English page, hreflang so Google shows the right one, and a switch that keeps the page. The bilingual page lists the ten places a second site is either right or quietly wrong.

What it must never be

A translation widget. Machine Welsh reads as machine Welsh to anyone who speaks it, it fails the standards' test for a public body, and it does harm to a business trying to look local. If the Welsh cannot be written or checked by a person, the honest choice is an English site with a Welsh layer and a line saying a Welsh version is coming.