Bilingual Thai and English websites: do you need one, and how to do it right

Which businesses need a bilingual website?

Any business whose buyers read about it in English before they get in touch: a factory's foreign buyers, hotel guests, foreign patients, a head office abroad. A neighbourhood shop whose customers are nearly all Thai gets more from finishing its Thai pages first. The table sums up the businesses we build for most.

Every package at our web design agency in Thailand includes Thai and English. For a company site that foreign partners will read, see how we build bilingual company websites in Thai and English.

Running an English-only business in Thailand? Then the question runs the other way, and the answer is usually to add Thai. In our own keyword data for web design, Thai searches outnumber English ones by about ten to one, so if any of your customers are Thai, most of the searching happens on the Thai side.

Most people who search in English are already in Thailand

Our own site runs in Thai and English. In the 90 days to 24 October 2026, the English pages drew about 40% of the site's Google impressions, and about four in five of those came from people searching inside Thailand; the rest were spread across 41 other countries. So the English pages earn their keep at home too: they reach expats, travellers who have already arrived, foreign managers in Thai companies and Thais who search in English.

Can a translate button replace a bilingual site?

No. A button that translates the page in the browser when someone clicks it creates no English pages with URLs of their own for Google to store, so people searching in English never find you, and machine translation tends to mangle menu items, service names and trade terms. Plugins that generate translated pages on separate URLs do get indexed, but the text is still unchecked machine translation.

Several older articles that still rank for this topic put the translate button first. It helps a visitor get the gist, but it does not give you a bilingual website.

How does Google know which language a page is in?

From the text people can see on the page. Google does not use the lang attribute in the code, or the URL, to decide the language. A Thai page that is half English paragraphs, or an English page with a translated menu over Thai content, can end up shown to the wrong searchers.

Hreflang does a different job: it tells Google that /th and /en are the same content in two languages, so Google can show each searcher the version in their language. Keep the lang attribute anyway. Screen readers use it to pick a voice, and browsers use it to break Thai lines in the right places.

How do you set up a bilingual site so Google finds both languages?

Separate URLs per language, hreflang that points both ways, one language per page, everything Google reads translated, and no automatic language switching. These are the eight checks we run on every bilingual site before launch.

1. Separate URLs per language, such as /th/rooms and /en/rooms, with every page paired. Do not switch languages by cookie or script on one URL.
2. Hreflang that points both ways. The Thai page lists the English one, the English page lists the Thai one, and each lists itself. Tags that point one way only may be ignored.
3. x-default for everyone else. Point it at the version a visitor who reads neither language should see. Ours points to English.
4. One language per page. Keep the two languages out of each other's text, apart from brand names, product names and fixed terms.
5. Translate everything Google reads: the title, the meta description, image alt text and the schema, not only the visible copy.
6. A language switcher that lands on the same page. Switching on the Thai rooms page opens the English rooms page, not the home page.
7. No automatic redirect by browser language or IP. Google advises against it because people and Googlebot may never reach the other version. A banner that suggests the other language is fine.
8. Canonicals stay in their language. The English page's canonical is the English page, never the Thai one, and both languages go in the sitemap.

<link rel="alternate"hreflang="th"href="https://topwebasia.com/th/blog/bilingual-thai-english-website" /><link rel="alternate"hreflang="en"href="https://topwebasia.com/en/blog/bilingual-thai-english-website" /><link rel="alternate"hreflang="x-default"href="https://topwebasia.com/en/blog/bilingual-thai-english-website" />

Platforms handle this differently: some have languages built in, some charge for a second language every month. We compare them one by one in Wix, WordPress, Webflow, Framer or custom code compared.

A /en folder, an en. subdomain or a second domain?

For most businesses, a /en folder on the same domain. It is easy to set up, there is one site to look after, and the trust the domain builds helps both languages. topwebasia.com runs on /th and /en. The table follows Google's own comparison.

Check your own site in three minutes

1. Open a deep page, such as a service page, and switch language. You should land on the same page in the other language, not the home page.
2. Search Google for site:yourdomain/en. If no English pages show, Google has not stored them yet.
3. Look at an English page's title in the results. If it is still Thai, the translation stopped short.

Should the English pages be translated or written fresh?

Write them fresh from the same facts. English searchers use different words and want to know different things. In our own business, รับทำเว็บไซต์ (website building) gets about 2,900 searches a month, while the biggest English term for the same service, web design bangkok, gets about 480 (our keyword data, October 2026). The English page has to take its words from English searches, not from a translation.

Our data backs this up from another angle: nearly nine in ten impressions from English searches on our English pages came from queries naming a place in Thailand, such as bangkok, koh samui or thailand. Foreigners here search with the city name, so a Thai business's English pages should carry the city or district in their headings and copy.

Every package of ours works the last way: we write both languages from one brief, and you check the business facts, such as prices, services and product names, before launch.

Does a bilingual site help ChatGPT find your business?

Yes, with ChatGPT in particular. A study of multilingual European sites published on 5 August 2026 found ChatGPT's bot fetched English pages about 2.6 times more often than their share of real searches, and sites with an /en folder were cited by ChatGPT 122% more often. Copilot and Google's AI showed almost no lean towards English.

The same study found that out-of-date English pages get quoted back in AI answers, so an English page whose prices or services no longer match the Thai one is worse than none. On our own site every price and business fact comes from one data file, so the Thai and English pages cannot disagree. If your site is edited page by page, change both languages on the same day, every time.

Where do the Thai and English designs need to differ?

In the fonts, the line height, the line breaks and the room given to buttons. Thai stacks vowels and tone marks above and below the letters and puts no spaces between words. English has spaces and breaks lines easily, but the same message runs to a different length.

• A font that carries Thai. Many Latin fonts have no Thai letters, so the browser swaps in another face and tone marks can land in the wrong place. We use Noto Sans Thai for Thai body text and Sriracha for Thai headings.
• Line height. Give Thai body text at least 1.6. Any tighter and the tone marks of one line run into the lower vowels of the line above.
• Line breaks. Mark Thai pages lang="th" so the browser breaks lines with its Thai dictionary, and keep key phrases, such as service names, from splitting across lines.
• Buttons, menus and labels. Leave room for both languages. A label that fits in one can overflow or wrap in the other.
• Images with words in them. Make one per language, or use real text on the page, because Google and screen readers read text inside images poorly.
• Dates and prices. Buddhist Era years on Thai pages, Western years on English pages, and prices in baht in both.

How will foreign customers contact you?

Put WhatsApp and email next to LINE on your English pages. Most Thais message on LINE, but many foreign customers do not use it and reach for WhatsApp or email first. Our own site shows LINE and WhatsApp side by side on every page, in both languages.

If the English pages have a form that collects names, emails or phone numbers, give them a privacy notice in English that the people filling it in can read. This is general information, not legal advice.

How much more does a two-language site cost?

It depends on who writes the second language and whether the platform charges for it. Among the published prices of 19 Thai web builders (read 10 October 2026), a second language added ฿2,000 or ฿4,000, an automatic translation system ฿5,000, and some platforms charge for extra languages every month.

At TopWebAsia the second language is not an add-on: even the ฿4,500 one-page site comes in Thai and English.

After launch, how do you know the English side is being found?

In Google Search Console: filter the Performance report to pages containing /en/ and look at impressions, queries and countries. If the English pages still show no impressions several weeks after launch, check whether Google has stored them at all.

1. Open the Performance report and add a page filter for URLs containing /en/.
2. Check the Countries tab. If most searchers are in Thailand, as ours are, the English pages should name Thai places and show prices in baht.
3. Check the Queries tab: the searches bringing people in should be English and match what you sell.
4. Run URL Inspection on English pages with no impressions to see whether Google has indexed them and which canonical it chose.
5. For a cleaner view, add a URL-prefix property for the /en/ folder in Search Console.