Should Your Business’ Website Be in More Than One Language?
The Canary Islands welcome millions of tourists every year — and they come from everywhere. The UK, Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, France. Most of those visitors will look your business up online before they visit, book, or buy. And when they land on your website, the first thing they'll register — often unconsciously — is whether it speaks their language.
This isn't about being unwelcoming. It's about how people interact with the internet. When someone encounters a website in a language they don't fully understand, trust drops immediately. They can't be sure what they're reading, whether the prices are right, or what they're actually agreeing to. Even a tourist with reasonable English will feel more confident booking through a site in their native language than one they're half-reading.
For small businesses in the Canary Islands that rely on tourist trade, offering your website in multiple languages isn't a nice extra. It's a competitive advantage — and for many businesses, a missed opportunity that's costing them bookings.
Which languages should you consider?
The answer depends on your specific market, but for most tourist-facing businesses in the Canary Islands, the priority languages are:
English — if it isn't already your primary language, it should almost certainly be your first translation. English is the default language of international tourism and the one most visitors will fall back on if their own language isn't available.
German — Germany consistently sends the largest number of tourists to the Canary Islands, particularly to Lanzarote, Fuerteventura, and Gran Canaria. German visitors are also known for researching and planning their holidays thoroughly, which means they're exactly the kind of people who will read your website carefully before making a decision.
Spanish — essential if you're also trying to reach local residents and Spanish-speaking visitors, and important for your credibility with the local business community.
Dutch and Scandinavian languages — worth considering depending on your specific location and the demographic makeup of your tourist market. The Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark all send significant numbers of visitors to the islands.
You don't have to do all of these at once. Starting with English and one other language — German is a strong choice for most island businesses — is a perfectly sensible approach. The important thing is to get started.
Option 1: Use Weglot — Squarespace's recommended translation partner
If your website is built on Squarespace, the simplest and most effective solution is Weglot — Squarespace's officially recommended multilingual extension.
Weglot integrates directly into your Squarespace dashboard without any code required. Once connected, it automatically detects all the content on your site and generates a first-pass translation using leading machine translation technology — including DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft Translator. You then have full editing control over those translations, so you can refine, correct, or personalise anything that doesn't read naturally.
A language switcher appears automatically in your site's header, allowing visitors to switch between languages with a single click. Translated versions of your pages are hosted on language-specific subdomains, which means they're indexed separately by Google — so your site can appear in search results in multiple languages, reaching people searching in German or Dutch as well as English.
What it costs: Weglot offers a free plan for sites with up to 2,000 words translated into one language, which may be sufficient for very small sites. Beyond that, pricing scales with the number of words and languages. It's worth checking current pricing on the Weglot website, as plans change, but for most small business websites the cost is modest relative to the bookings it can generate.
The practical advantage of Weglot over doing it manually is that it stays in sync with your site automatically. When you update a page, add a new product, or publish a blog post, Weglot detects the new content and translates it — you don't have to remember to update each language version separately.
Option 2: Do it yourself — if you speak the languages
If you're genuinely fluent in the languages you want to offer, doing the translation yourself is a perfectly valid option — and in some ways the best one. No machine translation, however good, quite captures the nuance and natural flow of a native or near-native speaker. If you can write your Spanish or German content yourself, it will almost certainly read better than an automatically generated translation that hasn't been edited.
In Squarespace, the manual approach involves creating duplicate pages for each language version of your site and translating the content yourself. It's more time-consuming to set up, but gives you complete control over how every word reads in every language.
A few practical things to bear in mind if you go this route:
Be consistent. If you translate your main pages manually, make sure you keep them updated when you change the English version. An outdated German page with old prices or discontinued services creates confusion and erodes trust.
Think about SEO for each language. A German page that's a word-for-word translation won't necessarily rank in German search results for the terms German tourists actually use. If SEO in multiple languages matters to you — Weglot's approach of hosting translated content on separate subdomains with automatic indexing has a practical advantage here.
Consider a hybrid approach. Translate your most important pages yourself — your homepage, your key services pages, your booking page — and use Weglot for the rest. The pages where the quality of the language matters most (where trust is built and decisions are made) are worth the extra effort; background pages less so.
Option 3: Hire a professional translator
For businesses where the quality of the language is particularly important — high-end holiday rentals, luxury experiences, businesses where the brand voice is a key part of the offer — professional human translation is worth considering for at least the core pages of the site.
A professional translator who specialises in tourism and hospitality content will produce copy that doesn't just communicate accurately but feels genuinely natural and appealing to a native speaker. The difference between machine-translated copy and professionally written copy in German or Dutch is often immediately noticeable to a native speaker — and for a business where first impressions matter, that difference can be significant.
This can be combined with a tool like Weglot: use professional translation for your key pages, and let the tool handle the rest.
What a multilingual site does for your Google visibility
Here's something that surprises many people: a multilingual website doesn't just help visitors who arrive on your site — it helps more visitors find you in the first place.
When a German tourist searches for "Bootsfahrt Lanzarote" (boat trip Lanzarote) or "Ferienwohnung mit Pool Teneriffa" (holiday apartment with pool Tenerife), a website with properly indexed German-language content can appear in those results. A site with English-only content almost certainly won't.
Weglot handles this automatically by hosting your translated content on language-specific subdomains that Google indexes separately. The manual approach requires more careful setup to achieve the same SEO benefit, but it's achievable.
Combined with a strong Google Business Profile — which also supports multiple languages — a multilingual website significantly expands the range of searches your business can appear in. For tourist-facing businesses competing with larger operators and booking platforms, that additional visibility can make a meaningful difference.
Where to start
If you're a small business in the Canary Islands and you're not offering your website in at least two languages, start with this:
Identify the nationalities that make up the majority of your tourist customers — check your booking data, your Google Analytics, or simply think about who you see most often.
Prioritise one additional language beyond your current primary language — English if you're currently Spanish-only, or German if you're already in English.
If your site is on Squarespace, connect Weglot through your dashboard and use the free trial to see how it works with your site before committing.
Review and edit the automatic translations for your most important pages — your homepage, your services, and your booking or contact page — before going live.
The goal isn't perfection from day one. It's giving more visitors a reason to stay, read, and book — in a language that feels like yours as much as theirs.
If you'd like help setting up a multilingual Squarespace site, or thinking through which languages to prioritise for your specific market, I'd love to chat. I offer a free 45-minute consultation for small businesses in the Canary Islands and beyond.
Polly Taylor is a freelance web and UX designer based in Lanzarote, working with small businesses, freelancers and charities across the Canary Islands and beyond. Visit pollytaylor.com or contact Polly to find out more.