Chinese business owners in New Zealand nearly all hesitate over this: should the website be in Chinese, English, or both.
The conclusion first. The answer depends on who your customers are, not which language you personally use. Those two things get conflated constantly.
Work out where your customers come from
Do not estimate. Go through last year’s clients and split them roughly: what proportion are Chinese, what proportion are not.
Then ask the more important question: which part are you trying to grow?
Many Chinese-owned businesses here get ninety percent of their work through the Chinese community, on referral and WeChat. An English site then is not about serving existing customers — it is about opening a market you currently cannot reach. That is a strategic decision, not a language one.
Three situations, three answers:
Almost all customers are Chinese and you are not expanding soon. Chinese only. Concentrating money and effort on one language produces better content. A roughly translated English site only makes you look unprofessional to the occasional local visitor.
Mostly local customers. English only, no Chinese at all. For businesses serving the local community, adding Chinese returns nothing and adds maintenance.
Both matter, or you want to open the other side. Now bilingual is worth it. Be prepared, though: a bilingual site costs closer to twice as much to maintain, not one and a half times. Every content change happens twice, every article is written twice.
The common mistake: treating bilingual as translation
The usual wrong turn is writing the Chinese and then translating it.
The problem is that the two audiences do not care about the same things.
Concretely: a renovation company’s Chinese pages might emphasise a Chinese-speaking team, contact by WeChat, and familiarity with how Chinese families use their homes. Those are genuine decision factors for that audience.
Translate them onto the English page and they mean nothing to a local customer, and read slightly oddly. That customer wants the licence number, the insurance, whether you can supply references from past projects, and how quotes are calculated.
So the right approach is writing both, not translating one. The structure can match; the arguments and evidence should be organised separately. That is where the real cost of a bilingual site sits — not translation fees, but two content strategies.
Conversely, if translation is all you have capacity for, one language done well is the better choice.
Three things that must be right technically
Bilingual sites have several traps that cause Google to index one language only, or to serve the wrong version to the wrong person.
1. Each language needs its own URLs.
Correct: example.co.nz/about/ and example.co.nz/en/about/, both directly openable, bookmarkable and shareable.
Wrong: one address with a button that swaps the text via script. Google sees only one version, and the other language effectively does not exist. This is both the most common and the most damaging error.
2. Declare the relationship with hreflang.
Each page states: this is the Chinese version and the English one is at this address — and the English page points back. It must go both ways; one direction alone does not count.
Without it, Google may treat the two as duplicates, or serve the Chinese page to someone searching in English, which produces a very high bounce rate.
3. Do not redirect automatically.
Some sites send visitors to a version based on browser language. It looks considerate and causes two problems: the detection is frequently wrong, since plenty of Chinese speakers run English browsers, and crawlers get redirected away, so the other language is never indexed.
Land people on the version they clicked, put a language switch somewhere obvious, and let them choose.
Simplified and traditional Chinese
New Zealand’s Chinese community is predominantly simplified-reading, with a substantial minority from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Simplified alone is usually sufficient, since traditional readers manage simplified without difficulty. If your customers are clearly Hong Kong or Taiwanese, use traditional. Running both is not advisable — double the maintenance for little return, and it turns an already complex bilingual structure into four sets of pages.
The financial reality
A bilingual build usually costs thirty to fifty percent more than a single-language one rather than double, because design, structure and development are shared. The addition is mostly content and configuration for the second set of pages.
Long-term, budget closer to double. Every content update, every article, every promotion is two pieces of work.
So we tend to ask clients one question: how often do you plan to update the site? If the answer is essentially never, the bilingual burden is light. If you intend to publish continuously, think hard about whether both languages can be sustained. If they cannot, one good site beats two half-finished ones.
Our own site is bilingual with both sides written separately rather than translated. Among the clients we have worked with there are both kinds — some Chinese only, some English only — decided by who their customers are rather than defaulting to both.