Should your Canadian business have a Spanish version of its website?

A question we get from both sides

Some Calgary clients ask because their customers keep switching to Spanish on the phone. Some ask because they want to sell to Mexico or Colombia. And some ask because a competitor did it and they are not sure whether it matters. The answer is different for each.

When a Spanish version pays off

Your customers already speak it. A share of your customers, staff or suppliers are Spanish speakers. Calgary and Edmonton both have large and growing Latin American communities; if your business serves them, a site in their language says “you are welcome here” before anyone picks up the phone. Canadian Raw puts “Service in English & Spanish” in the header of every page for exactly this reason, and Spanish-speaking dog owners in Calgary found the store through it.

You sell outside Canada. If you ship to, serve or recruit from Latin America or Spain, an English-only site loses most of that market at the first click. Search behaviour is in Spanish, the questions are in Spanish, and the trust is built in Spanish.

Your team can answer in Spanish. This is the one people forget. A Spanish website that leads to an English-only phone line or an English-only reply is a broken promise. If the team can serve in Spanish, the site should say so loudly. If it cannot, fix that first.

When it does not

If none of your customers speak Spanish and you have no plan to serve a Spanish-speaking market, a translated site is maintenance without return. Every page you change in English now needs changing in Spanish. That is fine when the pages earn their keep; it is a burden when they do not.

Doing it because a competitor did is not a reason. Doing it because your customers asked is.

How to do it properly

Write it, do not generate it. Auto-translation plugins and browser translation produce Spanish that native speakers spot in one sentence: literal phrasing, wrong register, terms no one uses. For a business trying to build trust, that is worse than English only. Have the pages written or translated by someone who writes Spanish for a living and knows the audience (Latin American Spanish and Spain Spanish differ in vocabulary and tone).

Start with the pages that matter. Home, the main services, contact, and whatever explains how to buy or book. A bilingual site does not need to be a mirror on day one. Add pages as the Spanish traffic justifies them.

Use hreflang. Each English page carries a tag pointing to its Spanish version and vice versa, so Google shows the right language to each searcher and does not treat the two as duplicates. Prodigy Holidays runs Portuguese and English this way: one site, two languages, each page linked to its twin, and Google serves the Lisbon family and the Manchester couple different pages for the same apartment.

Give it a real switcher. A clear EN / ES toggle in the header, not a flag (flags are countries, not languages, and Spanish has twenty of them). The old Prodigy site had a language switcher made of broken flag icons; the new one has two letters that work.

Localize the details. Phone numbers with the right country format, currency (CAD for a Canadian business, stated), business hours with the time zone, and forms that accept accents and the letter ñ. Small things that signal the site was made for the reader rather than run through a machine.

Make the follow-up bilingual too. The contact form should let the visitor choose the language of the reply. Ours does: a “Hablamos español” checkbox, and the auto-reply and the human answer come in the language chosen.

What it costs

For a site we build, a Spanish (or Portuguese) version is an add-on to any package, priced by the number of pages translated and whether we write the Spanish copy or adapt yours. As a rough guide, a bilingual version of a 7-page Launch site adds around a third to the project. For existing sites, we quote after seeing the page count.

A note from a bilingual agency

Our team works in English and Spanish natively; the founder splits his time between Calgary and Uruguay. Half our clients in Latin America found us because we could talk to them in their language, and a good number of our Calgary clients chose us because their customers speak Spanish and they wanted a site, and a partner, that could too. If that is your situation, tell us in whichever language you prefer.