The short answer: no, you do not have to translate everything, and certainly not on day one. A French/Dutch website that works starts with the pages that generate enquiries (home, services, contact), in a structure where each language has its own URL, then grows with real traffic. The expensive part is not the initial translation: it is keeping two versions alive for years. Here is how to decide whether Dutch is a must, in which order to translate, and how to avoid the mistakes that leave the second language invisible on Google. Figures quoted were checked on 12 September 2026.
Is Dutch a must for your website?
One figure to set the scene: on 1 January 2026, Belgium had 11,867,634 inhabitants, of whom 6,898,350 live in the Flemish Region (58%), 3,713,450 in the Walloon Region (31%) and 1,255,834 in the Brussels-Capital Region (11%), according to Statbel. A French-only website turns its back on almost six Belgians out of ten. But your market is not the whole of Belgium, and the real question comes down to three points.
Where are your customers? An accounting firm in Namur with a local client base does not need Dutch to fill its diary. A real estate agency in Brussels or Brabant does: part of its sellers and buyers are Dutch speakers. A manufacturer or B2B provider selling across the country has no choice: a Flemish buyer landing on a French-only site concludes, often rightly, that you do not serve their region.
Can you serve customers in Dutch? A Dutch website is a promise: that people can write and call you in that language. If nobody on the team can hold a conversation in Dutch, two options hold up: organise that service before translating, or own a French site with a short orientation page in Dutch explaining how you work.
And Brussels? The Brussels Region is bilingual by law, mostly French-speaking in daily life, and international in practice: in 2026 only one Brussels resident in two (50.6%) was born in Belgium, again according to Statbel. For many Brussels businesses, English is the real second language of the website, before or after Dutch depending on the clientele.
| Your situation | Recommended languages |
|---|---|
| Local clientele in Wallonia | FR only; NL if you are close to the language border |
| Consumers in Brussels | FR + NL, then EN depending on the neighbourhood and sector |
| International clientele in Brussels (expats, institutions) | FR + EN, then NL |
| B2B selling across Belgium | FR + NL; EN if you export |
| Export outside Belgium | EN first, then the language of each market |
What to translate first: the order that works
If Dutch is a must, do not start from the full list of your pages. Start from what the site has to produce, as with a website that converts, and translate in this order:
- 1. The pages that generate enquiries: the home page, service or offer pages, contact, and the team page, which carries trust. On a business website, that is rarely more than ten pages.
- 2. The proof pages: case studies, testimonials, pricing. A Dutch-speaking customer wants to see that you have already worked for people like them, ideally in Flanders.
- 3. The legal pages (privacy, cookies, terms): translate them at launch. A Dutch-speaking reader must be able to understand what you do with their data.
- 4. In-depth content (articles, guides, glossary): only what answers a question your Dutch-speaking customers actually ask. The rest is written directly in Dutch, on their topics, rather than translating articles written for a French-speaking reader.
Everything outside this list waits, and that is a decision, not an oversight: on a well-built CMS, an untranslated page sends the visitor to the available version with a clear notice, instead of showing an empty page or an error.
Translate or adapt?
A faithful translation is not enough, for two reasons.
Keywords do not translate. A French speaker searches for "création de site web"; a Dutch speaker types "website laten maken", not "creatie van website". A page translated word for word is correct Dutch and invisible on Google in Dutch, because it does not contain the phrases people actually use. Before translating a page, find the equivalent Dutch query and put it in the title, the URL and the subheadings.
The context changes. A page promoting the Brussels digitalisation grant means nothing to a customer in Antwerp. References, examples, sometimes prices and lead times are chosen for the intended reader. So is the tone: professional Dutch gets to the point faster, and a good Dutch version is often shorter than the original.
Who translates? Machine translation (DeepL, an AI assistant) produces a decent first draft, but publishing that draft as is shows, and the Dutch-speaking reader draws a conclusion: nobody at your company speaks their language. The right circuit: a professional native Dutch translator, briefed on your vocabulary, then a review by someone from the trade, a Dutch-speaking customer or partner. Count the texts everyone forgets too: form labels, error messages, the confirmation email, image alt texts and footer notices.
One URL per language, and Google informed
This is the technical part, and it decides the entire ranking of the second language. Google states it clearly in its guidelines (checked on 12 September 2026): use different URLs for each language version rather than switching the language of a single page based on a cookie or browser settings, and never automatically redirect a visitor to the language you assume is theirs, because those redirects prevent search engines (and visitors) from seeing all the versions.
In practice, four rules:
- One folder per language: yoursite.be/fr/ and yoursite.be/nl/. Google rates this structure as easy to set up and low maintenance. A subdomain (nl.yoursite.be) also works. A second domain name (one .be address per language) is only justified if your brand itself changes name from one language to the other.
- Translated URLs: /nl/website-laten-maken/, not /nl/creation-site-web/. The URL is part of the text Google reads. On our own site, the architects page lives at /fr/site-web-architecte/ and at /en/website-for-architects/, not at /en/site-web-architecte/.
- Hreflang tags that tell, on every page, where its twin in the other language lives, plus a sitemap that repeats those pairs. This is what lets Google show the Dutch version to a Dutch speaker rather than the French one, and stops the two versions competing against each other.
- A text language switcher ("NL", "Nederlands"), never a flag: a flag stands for a country, not a language, and no flag represents Belgian Dutch. The switcher goes to the equivalent page, not to the other language's home page.
The CMS must handle all of this natively: the pairing between versions, hreflang, one sitemap per language, untranslated pages. Bolted on afterwards through an add-on, multilingual is the first place where a website starts to break. It is one of the criteria that separates Webflow andWagtail, and one of the reasons we work with Wagtail, where every page exists in every language as a page in its own right, with its own URL.
What it really costs
An FR/NL website does not cost twice an FR website, as we explain in our article on prices. The budget splits into three lines, and the third is the one everyone forgets.
- 1. Translation: billed per word by a professional translator. A business website of eight to ten pages usually represents 3,000 to 5,000 words; your agency can export the exact count from the CMS before you ask for a quote. Technical texts (forms, messages, emails) come on top, but they are short.
- 2. Multilingual architecture: the URL structure, hreflang, the switcher, the sitemap, the per-language editing interface. At KernWeb it is included in the Premium package and available as an option on Business (see the packages). If you are still undecided, at least have the architecture prepared: adding a language to a site built to receive it takes days; adding it to a site that never planned for it is handled like a rebuild with migration.
- 3. Maintenance: every new page, every price change, every news item now exists twice. This line, more than the initial translation, explains why you do not translate everything. A simple rule before publishing a page in French: can you publish its Dutch version within the week? If not, either drop the page, or own a page available in French only, clearly flagged as such.
The mistakes that cost the most
- The automatic translation button on the site: the translation happens in the browser, on the same URL, so nothing exists in Dutch for Google, and the quality is that of an unreviewed machine.
- Translating the chrome but not the content: menu and footer in Dutch, texts in French. Google names precisely this case as a poor experience, and the visitor leaves.
- Automatic redirection based on browser language or IP address: a French speaker in Antwerp or a Dutch speaker in Brussels ends up in the wrong language with no way out, and Google sees only one version. A discreet banner offering the other language does the same job without those side effects.
- The abandoned second language: news from 2023 in Dutch while French is up to date. The visitor concludes that Dutch-speaking customers come second, which is exactly the message not to send.
- Images that speak French: a visual with baked-in text ("Devis gratuit") stays French on the Dutch page. Text belongs in the page, not in the image.
- The forgotten last mile: the form, the confirmation email, the thank-you page, validation messages. That is where the Dutch-speaking customer decides whether to write to you.
The questions we get asked
Do I need a Dutch website to be found in Flanders? Yes. Google serves Dutch pages to searches made in Dutch; a French page will not rank for "website laten maken" or "boekhouder Antwerpen", however good it is. Without a Dutch version, your visibility in Flanders is limited to people searching for your name.
Is one domain per language better than a single site? A single site with one folder per language (/fr/, /nl/) in the vast majority of cases: one authority to build, one maintenance effort, and a structure Google describes as easy to set up. Two domains are only justified if the brand changes name depending on the language.
Can Dutch be added later without rebuilding the site? Yes, if the site was built on a CMS where multilingual is native and the architecture was planned from the start, even with a single language published. On a tool where the second language is an add-on or a paid option, adding it often turns into a rebuild.
What about trilingual French, Dutch, English? Common in Brussels and in B2B. The principle stays the same: each extra language costs mostly in maintenance. Launch with the two languages you can keep alive, and add the third when enquiries in that language already exist.
Undecided about the languages of your future website? Tell us about your customers: we will have visited your current site before replying, and if Dutch can wait, we will say so.