Should your care home website be bilingual? (Welsh & English)

If your home is in Wales, this question comes up sooner or later: should the website be in Welsh as well as English? The honest answer is that it depends on who you're for — but for a lot of Welsh care homes, a proper bilingual site is one of the clearest ways to signal that you understand the families you serve. Here's how to decide, and what "proper" actually means.

Start with who your families are

Around one in five people in Wales speak Welsh, and in parts of the west and north that figure is far higher. More importantly, for many older people Welsh is their first language and the one they're most comfortable in at an anxious moment. When a daughter in Carmarthenshire or Gwynedd is looking for a home for her mam, a website that greets her in Welsh says something a list of features never could: we get you, and we'll speak her language. If your catchment has a strong Welsh-speaking community, bilingual isn't decoration — it's part of the care.

It's not just good manners — it's the direction of travel

The Welsh Government's "More Than Just Words" framework expects Welsh-language care to be offered actively, rather than left to families to request. Care Inspectorate Wales increasingly looks at whether providers meet the language needs of the people they support. Your website is the first place that commitment shows. A home that clearly offers Welsh-speaking care, in Welsh, on its own site, is telling both families and inspectors the same reassuring story.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Private providers' specific obligations vary — check your own position with a suitably qualified adviser.

Why a translate widget doesn't count

The tempting shortcut is a "translate this page" button or an auto-translate plug-in. Please don't. Machine-translated Welsh is often stilted and sometimes plainly wrong, and to a first-language Welsh speaker it reads as an afterthought — which is worse than no Welsh at all. It also does nothing for you on Google, because the translated text isn't stored as real, indexable Welsh pages. Doing it properly means:

• Professionally written Welsh — translated and checked by a fluent human, ideally someone who knows care.
• Real, separate pages for each language, each with its own URL, not text swapped in by a script.
• A clear, persistent language switch (Cymraeg / English) that keeps people on the same page, not dumps them back at the homepage.
• Correct hreflang tags so search engines know which page is which — which is where the SEO benefit comes from.

The SEO upside people miss

A bilingual site done properly doesn't split your audience — it doubles your shopfront. Welsh-language pages let you appear when someone searches in Welsh, and English pages keep working exactly as before. With the right technical setup the two never compete; they cover more ground. For homes in genuinely bilingual areas, ranking for Welsh-language searches can put you in front of families your English-only competitors never reach. It's the same logic as the rest of good healthcare SEO: meet people where and how they're actually searching.

When bilingual isn't worth it

Being straight with you: if your home sits in an area with very few Welsh speakers and your enquiries come almost entirely in English, the effort may be better spent elsewhere — on speed, accessibility and your enquiry path. Bilingual done half-heartedly, with stale or wrong Welsh, can look worse than a confident English-only site. The test is simple: would a Welsh-speaking family in your area feel more at home because of it? If yes, it earns its place. If you're not sure, it's usually a signal that your community leans English-first.

Getting it right

If you decide to go bilingual, build it in from the start rather than bolting Welsh on later — it's far cheaper and cleaner to design two languages together. That's how we approach care home sites in Wales, and you can see it in practice on Tregwilym Lodge, a bilingual dementia care home site rated Good–Excellent by CIW. Get the Welsh right, treat it as equal rather than an add-on, and the website quietly does what it should: makes every family — in either language — feel this is a place that understands them.