Multilingual Websites in India: Hindi, Gujarati & English

The most important rule is that each language version should live at its own URL. Google recommends this, and it avoids the common mistake of switching languages with a button that changes the text but not the address — which means search engines only ever see one version.

The simplest structure for most Indian sites is a folder per language on the same domain: /en/, /hi/ and /gu/, for example. It keeps everything under one domain, one hosting account and one CMS, and it's easy to understand.

You don't need every language on day one. Start with the languages your customers actually use: look at who calls, visits and enquires, and at the queries in Search Console. For a business in Gujarat that might be Gujarati and English; for a school in Uttar Pradesh, Hindi and English.

Launch with your most important pages translated properly — home, services, contact, key notices — rather than every page translated badly. You can add more pages and more languages once the workflow is running smoothly.

Every page should declare its language in the HTML with the lang attribute — lang="hi" for Hindi, lang="gu" for Gujarati, lang="en-IN" for Indian English. Browsers use it for fonts and pronunciation in screen readers, and search engines use it as a signal.

Between versions of the same page, add hreflang annotations: each language version lists all the others. This tells Google that the Hindi and English pages are equivalents, so it can show the right one depending on the searcher's language, instead of treating them as competing duplicates.

The CMS is where multilingual sites succeed or fail. If adding a Gujarati version of a notice means copying a page by hand and remembering to update both, the versions will drift apart within months.

A well-built CMS stores each piece of content once with a field per language — title, body, image text — so editors can see all versions side by side. It shows which translations are missing or out of date, and lets the site fall back to English for anything not yet translated, rather than showing an empty page.

Devanagari and Gujarati scripts need fonts that support them properly, including conjuncts and matras. Font families such as Google's Noto are designed to cover these scripts and pair well with Latin text. Test real content — long words, numbers, mixed English and Hindi in one sentence — on phones, not only on a desktop.

Editors should be able to type directly in the language using their usual keyboard or input tool. Avoid systems that store Indian-language text as images or in legacy non-Unicode fonts; that text can't be searched, copied or read by screen readers.

Machine translation is a useful first draft, especially for long, routine content. But for anything customers act on — prices, rules, forms, legal notices — a person who knows the language and the subject should review it. A mistranslated interest rate or eligibility rule is worse than no translation at all.

Keep a short glossary of terms that must always be translated the same way — your service names, product categories, official terms — so different editors stay consistent.

Multilingual isn't only the page text. The navigation, buttons, form labels, error messages, confirmation emails, downloadable PDFs and notices should all follow the visitor's language. A Gujarati visitor who fills in a form and gets an English-only error message has been dropped halfway through.

Numbers, dates and currency need care too. Decide whether to use Indian or international digit styles for each language, and keep prices, dates and phone numbers consistent across versions.

Each language version needs its own title tag and meta description, written in that language — not the English ones reused. The same goes for image alt text and structured data text. These are what appear in search results, and a Hindi searcher seeing an English title is less likely to click.

People search differently in each language, and often mix scripts — Hindi words typed in English letters, for example. Look at your Search Console queries to see what people actually type, and write each language version for how its readers search, not as a word-for-word copy of the English page.

Before a multilingual site goes live, check each language the way a real visitor would, on a phone: