Should Your Site Be in Hindi? Decide Honestly

Every few months a client asks whether the website should also be in Hindi, or Tamil, or Gujarati. It is a reasonable question and it usually gets a lazy answer. An agency that sells pages by the page will say yes. A developer who has never maintained a translated site will also say yes, because the build is the easy part.

The honest answer turns on two tests, and both have to pass. First: is there a real group of buyers who would read, trust or transact more easily in that language? Second: can you keep that version honest — accurate, current, and answered by a human — a year from now, when the launch excitement has worn off? Fail the second test and you have built something worse than nothing: a page that quotes last year's prices to a customer in their own language.

Who actually reads it

Start with the people who already give you money. Not the people you hope to reach — the ones in your invoices, your WhatsApp threads, your call log. What language do they open a conversation in? What language do they sign in?

Three patterns come up again and again in Indian businesses, and they point in different directions.

• Urban B2B buyers. A purchase manager at a factory in Ghaziabad may speak Hindi all day and still expect a quotation, a spec sheet and a website in English. Business documentation in India defaults to English, and a Hindi-only spec sheet can read as less professional rather than more welcoming. For most B2B companies, a second language on the website is near the bottom of the list.
• Consumer services with a local catchment. A diagnostic lab, a coaching centre, a property dealer, a clinic. Here the reader may genuinely be more comfortable in Hindi — but notice where they actually read. They read the Google Business Profile, the WhatsApp reply, the pricing poster. They may never reach your About page in any language.
• Genuinely regional reach. You sell agricultural equipment across Maharashtra, or run an NGO in rural Bihar, or your product is bought by people whose schooling was not in English. This is where a second language earns its keep, and where leaving it out costs you customers outright.

There is a search-behaviour wrinkle worth knowing. A great many Indians who think and speak in Hindi still type in Roman script — "ghar ka naksha", "sasta CCTV camera price" — rather than in Devanagari. Phone keyboards, habit, speed. So a beautifully translated Devanagari page is not automatically the page that matches what people type. Before committing, look at the actual queries in Google Search Console for your site over the last twelve months. If there is no Devanagari in there at all, that is a data point. It is not proof of nothing — you cannot rank for language you have never published — but it is the only free evidence you have.

A second, cheaper experiment: run one Hindi landing page for your single most commercial service, and one Hindi ad set pointed at it. You will learn more in six weeks than from a year of discussion.

The maintenance test nobody runs

A website is not a brochure. Prices move, services change, a branch closes, the phone number changes when you switch providers. Every one of those edits now has to happen twice. In practice what happens is that the English side gets updated and the Hindi side quietly drifts.

Ask yourself three questions and answer them out loud, with names attached:

1. Who writes the second language? Not "we'll find someone" — a named person, in your team or on retainer, who can write marketing copy rather than merely translate words. A literal translation of "end-to-end solutions" into Hindi is a sentence no Hindi speaker would ever say.
2. Who proofs it? You almost certainly cannot. If nobody in your office can judge the quality of the Tamil page, you are publishing text you cannot read under your own brand name. That is a real risk, not a theoretical one.
3. Who answers the enquiry? This is the one that sinks projects. A Hindi page generates a Hindi phone call. If your reception answers in English and your quotation arrives in English, you have advertised a service you do not provide. The customer notices.

If any of those three has no name against it, the answer is no — or the answer is a smaller version of yes, covered below.

What not to buy

We could sell every one of these. We would rather not.

The auto-translate widget. The little dropdown in the header that machine-translates the page in the browser. It feels free and harmless. It produces text Google generally does not index as separate pages, it mangles your product names and your prices, and it tells visitors you did not care enough to do it properly. If you want a translation widget because a handful of overseas visitors occasionally need one, fine — but do not count it as a multilingual website.

Machine-translating all two hundred pages at once. Modern machine translation is genuinely good, far better than it was five years ago, and it is a perfectly reasonable first draft. The problem is volume without review. Google's publicly documented spam policies describe scaled content abuse, and have long singled out text translated by automated tools without human review or curation. Nobody outside Google can tell you exactly where the line sits — anyone who claims to is guessing. What is clear is that a hundred unreviewed auto-translated pages is a bet you do not need to place to get the benefit.

Twelve languages because India has many languages. Each one multiplies the maintenance problem and none of them will be good. Two languages done properly beat eight done badly, every time.

A separate domain for the Hindi site. It splits whatever reputation your main domain has built, doubles your hosting and certificate admin, and gets forgotten at renewal. There are rare reasons to do it. "It felt tidier" is not one.

If you do it, the mechanics that matter

Assume you have passed both tests. A few things are worth getting right at build time because retrofitting them is painful.

URL structure. Use subdirectories on your main domain — yoursite.in/hi/services/ — rather than a subdomain or a separate domain. Simplest to host, simplest to secure, and everything stays under one property.

The lang attribute. Every page declares its language in the HTML. It is one attribute, it costs nothing, and it is what screen readers and browser translation tools read first.

hreflang tags. These are the bits of markup that tell search engines "this page and that page are the same content in different languages". Google documents them clearly. Two things trip people up: the tags must point back at each other from every version, and an x-default should name the page to show someone whose language you have not covered. Half-implemented hreflang is a common finding in a technical SEO audit.

Text in images. Any banner or infographic with English baked into the pixels needs a second version, or it needs the text pulled out into real HTML. The second option is better anyway — it is readable, searchable and editable.

Layout room. Devanagari sits taller than Latin script and many translations run longer than the English. Buttons and navigation built to fit English exactly will break. Tell your developer up front; it is a five-minute consideration at design stage and a rebuild later. Worth raising in the brief for the build.

Forms and the back end. If someone types their name in Devanagari into your enquiry form, does it survive the database, the email notification and the CRM record without turning into question marks? Test this before launch, with a real submission.

The smaller version of yes

Most businesses that ask about a Hindi website do not need a Hindi website. They need a Hindi path — the two or three touchpoints where language actually decides whether someone buys.

• One or two landing pages in the second language, for your highest-intent services, written properly and reviewed by a human.
• WhatsApp replies and automated message templates available in both languages. This is where Indian conversations actually happen, and it is far cheaper than a parallel site.
• Video and voice. A two-minute explainer in Hindi on your service page does more for a non-English reader than six translated paragraphs, and you do not have to maintain it when a price changes — as long as you keep prices out of the video.
• Your Google Business Profile description and your social captions, where bilingual posting is normal and nobody expects formality.

That package passes the maintenance test for almost anyone. It can be kept honest by one person in an afternoon a month. And if those pages pull real enquiries, you have evidence — not a hunch — that the full build is worth commissioning.

What to do next

Before you ask anyone for a quotation, do three things this week. Open Google Search Console and look at twelve months of queries for any non-English script. Look at your last fifty enquiries and note which language the customer opened in. Then write down the name of the person who will write and check the second language every month for the next two years.

If the first two show real demand and the third has a name in it, build it properly — subdirectories, hreflang, human-reviewed copy, one language to start. If the third is blank, do the smaller version instead and revisit in a year.

If you want a second opinion on which of those your business is, tell us who your customers are and how they contact you, and we will tell you plainly whether the translation is worth the money.

Questions we get asked