Websites & redesigns
Should my business website be in English as well as Portuguese?
Short answer
If a meaningful share of your customers are foreign residents, tourists or international companies, yes. In Cascais about one in ten residents holds a foreign nationality, and Sintra and the coast receive visitors all year, so restaurants, clinics, rentals and home services there often get searches in English. Write each language properly rather than machine translating, give each version its own address, link them with hreflang tags, and keep the Google profile consistent. If almost all your customers are Portuguese, put the effort into the Portuguese site first.
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Who usually needs it
- Restaurants, cafés, guesthouses and tour businesses in Sintra, Cascais and along the coast.
- Clinics, dentists, schools and home services with foreign residents among their customers.
- Small manufacturers looking for buyers abroad, such as the clothing and furniture makers of Lousada and Paredes.
How to do it properly
- Each language at its own address, for example
/pt/and/en/, never switched by a script on the same URL, so search engines can index both. - hreflang tags linking each page to its translation.
- Text written or checked by someone fluent. Machine translation reads as such, and visitors notice.
- The legal pages and the complaints book link in both versions.
- Prices, hours and contact details identical in both.
When to wait
If nearly all of your customers search in Portuguese, a strong Portuguese site and Google profile come first. An English page with the essentials, meaning what you do, where, and how to book, can come later.
People also ask this as
- Do I need an English version of my website?
- Does a bilingual website help SEO?
- Is machine translation good enough for a website?