Bilingual website design in Wales: does your business need a Welsh and English site?.

No law makes a private business in Wales publish its website in Welsh. Whether a Welsh and English site is worth building depends on where you trade and who your customers are: in Gwynedd nearly two in three people speak Welsh, in Newport fewer than one in twelve. Most small businesses do not need every page in both languages. They need the right amount of Welsh, built the way Google recommends and written by someone who can actually write it. This guide covers the rules, the numbers, three levels of Welsh to choose from, and what each does to the cost.

Is a Welsh-language website a legal requirement?

For a private business, no. The duties people have heard about are the Welsh Language Standards, and they are imposed on named organisations one at a time: the Welsh Language Commissioner sends each one a compliance notice listing the standards it must meet. The Commissioner describes those organisations as most public bodies in Wales, plus many British organisations that provide public services here. A plumber in Llanelli, a salon in Carmarthen or a cafe in Aberystwyth receives no such notice.

Two situations can still make Welsh a condition rather than a choice, so check them before you decide:

• Funding. Some grants, including some National Lottery funding, require the materials they pay for to be bilingual. Read the conditions of any award before you brief a designer.
• Public sector work. If a council, health board or other public body pays you to deliver a service to the public on its behalf, the contract may require that service to be available in Welsh. Read the contract.

Outside those cases the decision is commercial, and the useful question becomes how many of your customers would rather deal with you in Welsh.

Where the Welsh speakers are

The 2021 census counted 538,300 people aged three or over in Wales who could speak Welsh, 17.8% of the population. That national figure hides almost all of the useful detail, because the share varies tenfold from one council area to the next.

Council area	Able to speak Welsh, 2021 census
Gwynedd	64.4%
Isle of Anglesey	55.8%
Ceredigion	45.3%
Carmarthenshire	39.9%
Neath Port Talbot	13.5%
Cardiff	12.2%
Swansea	11.2%
Bridgend	9.2%
Newport	7.5%
Blaenau Gwent	6.2%

Two things are worth reading out of the table. First, the percentage is not the headcount. Carmarthenshire has 72,800 Welsh speakers, almost as many as Gwynedd's 73,600, so a business serving Carmarthen, Llanelli and Ammanford has a very large Welsh-speaking market on its doorstep. Second, the direction differs. Cardiff was one of only four council areas where the share rose between 2011 and 2021, from 11.1% to 12.2%, around 6,000 more speakers.

A caution on what the census measures: it records who can speak Welsh, not who prefers to buy in Welsh. Your own customers are better evidence. If people greet you in Welsh at the counter, ring in Welsh or write to you in Welsh, you already have your answer.

Three levels of Welsh, and which one fits

"Bilingual" covers very different amounts of work. Pick the level before you ask for a quote, because the price follows it.

Level	What it is	Suits	Extra work
A Welsh welcome	A greeting, a line saying you are happy to deal in Welsh, Welsh on your contact details	Businesses in mostly English-speaking areas with some Welsh-speaking customers	A few dozen words, no extra pages
Key pages in Welsh	Home, your main service and contact, each as a separate Welsh page	Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and anyone whose customers regularly use Welsh	Three or four extra pages, plus the form and its messages
Fully bilingual	Every page, every form, every email and every label in both languages	Gwynedd, Anglesey, Welsh-medium organisations, anyone with a funding or contract condition	The page count and the content job roughly double

The middle level is the one most often overlooked. A business in Llandeilo does not have to choose between an English site with a token "Croeso" and translating forty pages. Three good Welsh pages that a customer can read, trust and enquire from are worth more than forty that fall out of date.

Whatever level you choose, keep one promise: never offer more Welsh on the website than the business can honour. A Welsh page that ends in an English-only form, or invites calls in Welsh when nobody in the office speaks it, lets the customer down at the moment they trusted you.

If you already know which level you want, start a project and tell us. We will quote it as a fixed price with the Welsh pages counted in.

How a bilingual site should be built

There is a right and a wrong way to do this, and Google has written the right way down. Its guidance for multilingual sites comes to five rules.

1. Give each language its own address. Google recommends a different URL for each language version of a page, not one address that changes language by cookie or browser setting. In practice that means something like yoursite.co.uk/cy/ for the Welsh pages.
2. Keep each page in one language. Google works out a page's language from the words visible on it, and advises using a single language for the content and navigation on each page and avoiding side-by-side translations. The familiar layout with Welsh on the left and English on the right is the one to avoid.
3. Connect the two versions. Each page should point to its partner with an hreflang tag, using the code cy for Welsh, so Google can show a searcher the version in their language.
4. Let the visitor choose. Put a visible language switch on every page that leads to the same page in the other language, not back to the home page.
5. Do not redirect people automatically. Google says to avoid sending visitors to a language based on a guess about them, because it can stop both people and search engines seeing every version.

Welsh words in the web address are fine too, so /cy/cysylltu can sit alongside /contact.

None of this is exotic, but it has to be decided before the site is built. Each of the five rules shapes how the pages, the menu and the addresses are structured, which is why adding a second language to a finished site costs more than planning for it. The Welsh question belongs in your website brief, on day one.

Who writes the Welsh?

Building a bilingual site and writing good Welsh are separate jobs. A web designer supplies the structure. The Welsh itself should come from a qualified translator or a fluent member of your own team, and you should ask any designer, us included, which of those it will be.

There are three realistic sources.

Helo Blod. This is a free Welsh Government service, run through Business Wales, that translates up to 500 words a month into Welsh for a business, charity or community group. It will also check Welsh you have written yourself, and it gives away bilingual Open and Closed door signs, lanyards and badges. The practical limits matter: the allowance resets each calendar month, you can send up to ten requests a month, longer translations take up to four working days, and you cannot pay for extra words. The request must come from the business that will use the text, so your web designer cannot submit it for you. Material that a law or a funding condition requires to be in Welsh is not eligible.

A professional translator. Cymdeithas Cyfieithwyr Cymru is the professional association for Welsh translators and interpreters, and its website has a searchable directory. Its own guidance says translators usually charge per 1,000 words, most have a minimum fee, and some charge VAT. It also says to ask whether proofreading is included in the rate. Full Members are expected to deliver work that needs no further editing.

Your own team. If you or a colleague write Welsh confidently, write it yourselves and have Helo Blod check it. It will sound more like your business than a translation would.

Some rough arithmetic shows where each fits. A five-page site with about 400 words a page is 2,000 words. Helo Blod's allowance would cover that in four months, a page or so at a time, which is workable for a site you are building up gradually. If you want all five pages live on launch day, it is one job for a translator.

Machine translation can give you a first draft, but never publish it unchecked. A fluent reader spots a wrong mutation or a stiff, literal phrase at once, and a Welsh page with errors does more harm than no Welsh page.

Never offer more Welsh on the website than the business can honour.

What bilingual does to the price and the timeline

The honest answer is that the second language is mostly a content cost, and only partly a build cost.

The build. Every Welsh page is a page in its own right: it has to be laid out, checked on a phone, given its own title and description, and linked to its English partner. Our prices are set by page count. The published prices are £675 +VAT for up to five pages and £1,350 +VAT for up to ten, and each language version counts as a page, so adding Welsh to a five-page site usually moves it into the next tier. We put the exact figure in a fixed quote before any work starts.

The small print. The pages are the obvious part. The parts people forget are the form labels, the error messages, the thank-you page, the confirmation email, the cookie notice, the photo descriptions and the titles that appear in Google. A site is only as bilingual as its least translated screen.

The timeline. Content decides the launch date on most projects, and a bilingual one has two sets of it. Agree the English first, then translate. Translating a draft that is still changing means paying for the same paragraph twice.

Afterwards. Every change now has to be made twice. A new price, new opening hours or a new service needs its Welsh wording from someone, so agree at the start who supplies it. This is an easy way for a bilingual site to go wrong: the English is updated in March and the Welsh still shows last year's prices in October.

It is cheaper to decide all of this before the build than during it. That is how we plan every project, and Bethan Parry of Wales Roofing Solutions described the result in her review: "He offered great ideas and suggestions that really improved the final result."

Will Welsh pages help you get found on Google?

They help Welsh speakers find you. They will not lift your English pages. The hreflang tags tell Google which version to show to whom, and that is all they do.

What Welsh pages can do is rank for Welsh searches, and for searches about Welsh services, which far fewer websites are written for. We see a small version of this in our own Search Console. In the three months to early November 2026 our site was shown 146 times for the search "welsh english website design", and smaller numbers of times for "welsh language seo" and "seo cymru", without having a page that answered it. This guide is that page. The demand is modest, and it is real.

Your Google Business Profile is worth a line of Welsh as well. Our guide to local SEO in South Wales covers how the profile and the website work together.

Five mistakes that waste the money

• The automatic translate button. A widget that machine-translates the page for each visitor creates no Welsh pages for Google to find, and nobody has checked what it says.
• The flag. Use the words "Cymraeg" and "English" for the language switch. A flag stands for a country, not a language.
• The dead end. A Welsh page whose only button leads to an English form.
• The orphan. Welsh pages that exist but are not in the menu, so nobody finds them.
• The time capsule. Welsh pages nobody has updated since launch.

Each of these comes from treating Welsh as a feature to tick off, when it is a part of the business that has to be kept going.

How to decide

Three questions settle it for most businesses.

1. Does anything oblige you? Check your grant conditions and any public sector contracts.
2. How do your customers already speak to you? If Welsh comes through the door, over the phone or into the inbox, match it online.
3. Who will keep the Welsh up to date? If you cannot name that person, choose a smaller level and do it properly.

For a business in Port Talbot or Bridgend, the answer is often the first level: a real welcome in Welsh and a clear line about what you can offer. For one in Carmarthen, Lampeter or Caernarfon, key pages or a fully bilingual site will pay their way. If you are in the west, our web design in Carmarthen page explains how we work with businesses there, and our guide to web design in North Wales covers the north.

If you would like a fixed price for a site with the Welsh planned in from the start, start a project or ring 07916 214 843. There is no obligation, our prices are published, and if a Welsh welcome is all your business needs, we will say so. The detail of what a build includes is on our web design service page.