Hindi or English? Ask your customer first.

Most Indian business websites are in English. Many of their customers are more at home in Hindi.

Think of a kirana wholesaler in Kanpur, a tractor parts dealer in Haryana or a coaching centre in Patna. The owner talks to customers in Hindi all day. The shop board is in Hindi. The WhatsApp chats are in Hinglish. But the website is in formal English that nobody in the business would ever speak.

The customer opens it and reads two lines with difficulty. Then they go back to calling. Some go to a competitor who explained things in their language.

This does not mean every website should be in Hindi. A software firm selling to companies in Bengaluru should stay in English. The point is to write in the language your buyer thinks in.

You already know which language that is. Just look at your last fifty WhatsApp chats.

How to get the language right

1. Check what your customers write to you. If most chats come in Hindi or Hinglish that is your answer.
2. Pick one main language for the site. Make it the first thing people see. Add the second language with a clear switch at the top.
3. Write it fresh instead of translating word by word. Machine translation reads stiff and strange. Ask someone who speaks the language every day to read every line.
4. Keep the words simple in Hindi too. Write the Hindi people speak, not the Hindi of government forms. Words like delivery, order and offer can stay as they are.
5. Use a font that shows Hindi clearly on phones. Some fonts break the matras on small screens. Check the page on a basic Android phone.

Mistakes to avoid

• Writing half a page in Hindi and half in English with no switch
• Putting Hindi text inside images where Google cannot read it
• Translating the home page and leaving the other pages in English
• Forgetting the Hindi page when prices or timings change

A Hindi page also helps with search. Many people now search in Hindi or speak their search into the phone. A page written in Hindi can show up for those searches.

If your customers are in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu or Bengal the same idea works for Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil or Bengali. Start with the language of your biggest group of customers.

What to do in the next 7 days

• Day 1: Read your last 50 customer chats and note which language most of them use.
• Day 2: Decide the main language for your website.
• Day 3: Rewrite your home page in that language with someone who speaks it every day.
• Day 4 to 7: Show the new page to five customers and ask if it is easy to read.

We build websites in English, in Hindi or in both. Message us on WhatsApp

In which language do most of your customers talk to you? Tell us in the comments.