Many of your customers would happily read your website in English. Some would much rather read it in Hindi or Bengali, and a few will only phone you if they can. Maybe your staff already answer calls in two languages, and the website is the one place where the business only speaks English.
Adding a Hindi or Bengali version can make the site feel like it is speaking to those customers directly. It can also go badly: half-translated pages, text that reads like a machine wrote it, letters that break apart on some phones. This post covers how to plan it, how to get the translation right, and the technical details around fonts and URLs that are easy to miss.
Decide what you are actually translating
You do not have to translate every page on day one. Start with the pages a Hindi- or Bengali-speaking customer needs to decide and get in touch:
- The home page
- Your main service or product pages
- Pricing or “how it works”, if you have them
- Contact, with the form, phone number and address
- Any page your staff often send people to, such as directions or a returns policy
Blog posts and older pages can follow later, or not at all. A small set of well-translated pages is far better than a whole site where half the links drop the visitor back into English without warning.
Also decide who will keep it up to date. Every time you change a price, a phone number or an offer on the English page, the translated page needs the same change. If nobody owns that job, the two versions drift apart within months, and a customer reading an outdated Bengali page may quote you an old price. Put the translated pages on the same update checklist as the English ones.
Get the translation right
Use a person, not just a tool
Machine translation is useful for a first draft, but on its own it tends to produce text that is technically correct and sounds wrong: overly formal Hindi full of words nobody uses in conversation, or Bengali that reads like a government notice. Customers notice straight away.
The safer process is to have a fluent speaker translate the page, or at least rewrite a machine draft, and then have a second native speaker read it. Ideally that second person knows your trade, so technical terms come out the way your customers actually say them.
Choose the register on purpose
Decide how formal the site should sound, and tell the translator. In Hindi, that includes whether to address the reader as “aap”, which most businesses will want, and how much everyday English to keep. Many people say “booking”, “service” or “delivery” in English even when speaking Hindi or Bengali, and forcing a pure translation of every such word can make a page harder to read, not easier. Agree on a short list of terms and use them the same way on every page.
Translate the small text too
It is easy to translate the paragraphs and forget everything around them: menu items, button labels, form field names, error messages, the cookie notice, the footer, and the confirmation message after someone submits a form. A Hindi page with an English “Submit” button and an English error message feels unfinished. Some of this text comes from your theme and plugins, which WordPress handles through translation files. Our post on why the WordPress language is not changing explains how that part works.
Fonts and how the text displays
Hindi is written in Devanagari and Bengali in the Bengali script. Both use joined letters and vowel signs that attach above, below and around consonants. This is where multilingual sites can quietly go wrong.
Use real Unicode text
Some older typing tools for Hindi and Bengali, such as Kruti Dev fonts for Hindi or Bijoy-style fonts for Bengali, store text in a legacy encoding that only looks right when that exact font is installed. On a website, text like that shows up as random Latin letters for most visitors, cannot be searched, and cannot be read by screen readers. If your translator sends a file typed that way, it needs converting to Unicode before it goes on the site. A quick test: paste a sentence into a plain text editor. If it still shows Hindi or Bengali letters, it is Unicode.
The same applies to text inside images. A banner with Hindi text baked into a picture cannot be read by search engines or translated by the visitor’s browser. Keep headings and offers as real text.
Pick a font that supports the script
Many popular Latin web fonts have no Devanagari or Bengali characters. When the theme’s font cannot show a letter, the browser falls back to whatever font the device has, and you can end up with English in one typeface and Hindi in another, or broken conjunct letters on some phones. Choose a web font designed for the script. Google Fonts offers several, such as Noto Sans Devanagari, Mukta and Hind for Hindi, and Noto Sans Bengali and Hind Siliguri for Bengali. Load only the weights you use, so the site does not get slower.
If letters or icons are already showing as boxes or in the wrong font, our guide on WordPress fonts and icons not showing walks through the usual causes.
Give the text room
Devanagari and Bengali usually need a little more line height than English, because the vowel signs extend above and below the line. Text that looks fine in English can look cramped, with signs touching the line above. Test the translated pages on a real phone, not just the desktop, and adjust line height and font size for that language if needed.
URLs and the language switcher
Each language version should have its own address, so it can be shared, bookmarked and found in search. The common pattern on a WordPress site is a folder per language, for example yourbusiness.com/hi/ for Hindi and yourbusiness.com/bn/ for Bengali, with the English version at the main address.
For the page slugs, you have a choice between English words, transliterated words, or slugs in Devanagari or Bengali script. Native-script slugs work, but when someone copies the link it usually turns into a long string of percent signs and codes, which looks broken in a WhatsApp message. Many sites keep slugs in plain Latin letters for that reason.
For the switcher, label each language in its own script, so a Bengali reader sees “বাংলা” and a Hindi reader sees “हिन्दी”. Avoid flags: a language is not a country. Make sure the switcher takes the visitor to the same page in the other language, not back to the home page.
Search engines also need to be told which pages are translations of each other. That is handled with hreflang tags and the right plugin setup, covered in our companion post on multilingual WordPress and what Google needs.
Check the rest of the journey
Submit the form on the Hindi and Bengali pages and confirm the text arrives readable in the notification email, the spreadsheet or the CRM, not as question marks. Check that the thank-you message and any automatic reply are in the same language. Then read every translated page once more on a phone, as a customer would.
For where this fits among other website upgrades, see our guide to what business websites need now.
If you want help building it
A second language is mostly careful planning and careful checking. If you want the multilingual setup, fonts, URLs and switcher built properly on your WordPress site, our website development team can plan it with you, including which parts need your translator rather than a developer.
Next in this series: Multilingual WordPress: Plugins and What Google Needs
