How Should a Malaysian Business Website Handle Two Languages?

Give each language its own pages. A Malaysian business website in English and Bahasa Melayu, or English and Chinese, works best as two matching sets of pages at separate addresses, each written wholly in one language, joined by a switch that leads to the same page in the other language and by hreflang tags that tell Google which page partners which. Translate the pages that lead to an enquiry first, not the whole site. And add a language only if someone in the business can reply in it.

Search for multilingual website Malaysia and most of what comes back debates whether you need one. The harder questions come after you decide: how the pages are built, which get translated, and who keeps them current. That is where bilingual sites go wrong, and nearly all of it can be fixed without a rebuild.

Multilingual website Malaysia: does each language need its own page?

Yes. Google’s guidance for multilingual sites is direct: it “recommends using different URLs for each language version of a page rather than using cookies or browser settings to adjust the content language on the page”. A page at /services/ in English and another at /ms/perkhidmatan/ in Bahasa Melayu can each be found, indexed and shown to someone searching in that language. A page that swaps language inside the visitor’s browser exists only once, as far as Google can tell.

Three common set-ups fail that test:

• Both languages on one page. An English paragraph, then the same paragraph in Bahasa Melayu, all the way down; common on sites that began as a printed brochure. Google says it “uses the visible content of your page to determine its language”, and asks owners to help by “using a single language for content and navigation on each page, and by avoiding side-by-side translations”.
• A translate widget. A dropdown that machine-translates the page on request. The WordPress documentation says of plugins like this: “Automatic translation is not good enough and pages on the site might be badly translated.” Nothing is published at an address of its own, so there is no second-language page to index.
• A switch that guesses. The site reads the browser’s language or the visitor’s location and redirects. Google asks sites to avoid “automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version”, partly because its crawler “usually originates from the USA” and “sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language”. A customer in Shah Alam whose phone is set to English but who would rather read Malay is overruled too.

Where should the language switch go?

On every page, in the same place, leading to the same page in the other language. Google suggests sites “consider adding hyperlinks to other language versions of a page”. A switch that drops someone on the other language’s homepage makes them hunt for their page again. Name each language in its own words, Bahasa Melayu and 中文 rather than BM and CN, and leave the flags out: a Malaysian flag does not say Malay, and a Union Jack beside English suggests a British company.

For the addresses, a subfolder such as /ms/ on your existing domain is the simplest choice for most businesses. Google’s own comparison lists subdirectories as “easy to set up” and “low maintenance (same host)”, and marks URL parameters such as ?lang=ms “not recommended”. If the English pages already rank, leave their addresses alone and add the new language beside them; moving them means redirects, as our guide to redesigning a website without losing SEO rankings explains.

Two languages means two pages, each wholly in one language, each pointing at the other.

Which pages should you translate first?

Not all of them. A fifteen-page site with forty blog posts does not need fifty-five translations to serve Malay-speaking customers. It needs the pages a customer passes through on the way to an enquiry, translated well, with the English site behind them:

• The home page, at least its first screen.
• The service pages for the work you most want, starting with services bought by people who search in that language.
• The contact page: address, opening hours, where to park.
• The form itself, including its error messages, the thank-you message and the auto-reply email.
• The WhatsApp button’s pre-filled message. A Malay page that opens a chat beginning “Hi, I would like to enquire” has switched language at the last step. Our article on where the button goes and what it should say covers the wording.

Google allows for this. Its hreflang documentation says that if a full set of links for every language becomes hard to maintain, “you can omit some languages on some pages”, and adds that new language pages should be linked both ways with the original. What does not work is the opposite half-measure: translating the menu and footer while the page itself stays in English. Google warns that translating “only the boilerplate text” of a page can “create a bad user experience” when the same content turns up in search under different languages.

Blog posts come last, and only the ones people still read. A site with more pages than anyone could translate may simply have more pages than it needs; see our guide to deciding which pages should go. And a muddled English menu, translated, is two muddled menus, which is why fixing the structure comes first.

Is machine translation good enough for a business website?

As a first draft, often. As the published page, rarely. Google does not penalise translation as such. Its spam policies list, among examples of scaled content abuse, pages generated through “automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques” where “little value is provided to users”. Five service pages translated with care are nowhere near that. Fifty old blog posts pushed through a plugin overnight are closer than most owners would like.

The bigger risk is the reader. Check that the Malay is Malaysian: it shares most of its grammar with Indonesian but not all of its vocabulary, so a car is a kereta, not a mobil, and a Malaysian reader notices the wrong one at once. Chinese pages for Malaysia use simplified characters. Then check prices, dates and anything legal, which tools translate word for word.

Who checks it matters more than which tool wrote it. The person who answers your phone in that language often makes a better reviewer than a translator who has never seen the product. Ask them to read each page aloud; stiff phrasing sounds wrong before it looks wrong.

What does hreflang need to say on a Malaysian site?

Hreflang is the tag that tells Google two pages are the same content in different languages, so it can show each searcher the right one. It does not translate anything, and it does not tell Google what language a page is in: the Search Central page on localised versions says “Google doesn’t use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect the language of a page”. Google reads the page for that. The tag’s only job is the pairing.

Three rules on the same page decide whether it works. “Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.” Alternate URLs “must be fully-qualified”, starting with https://. And “if two pages don’t both point to each other, the tags will be ignored”. Most multilingual plugins write the tags for you. The errors creep in later, when someone adds a page in one language and never links its partner.

Malaysian sites have one trap of their own. The language code comes first, and Google warns that “you can’t specify the country code by itself”. Malaysia’s country code is MY, but in the ISO 639-1 list of languages, my is Burmese. Malay is ms.

Can your business keep up two languages?

A second language is a promise: that the page is current, and that someone will reply in the language the customer wrote in. A Bahasa Melayu service page that ends in a WhatsApp reply in English, or an English auto-reply, breaks that promise at the moment it matters. Our article on what happens after someone submits your contact form covers that last stretch; with two languages, every step in it exists twice.

Cost follows the same shape. We do not put a ringgit figure on translation here, because no single range would be honest across sites, but the drivers are easy to list:

• Words, not pages. Ten service pages of 600 words each is 6,000 words to translate and review.
• How often pages change. Every edit to an English page is an edit to its partner. A price page updated monthly costs twelve times a year; a contact page almost never.
• Review by a native reader who knows the trade, for every page and every change.
• The machinery: a plugin licence where needed, and template work so the forms and emails switch language with the page.

If that is more than the business can carry, one language kept well beats two kept badly. A Malay page still showing last year’s prices tells the reader the business stopped thinking about them. The second language belongs in the same website care plan as the first.

Do you need a new website to add a second language?

Usually not. The WordPress documentation notes that WordPress “currently does not support a bilingual or multilingual blog out-of-the-box”, so a multilingual WordPress site relies on a plugin, and the documentation describes four kinds. For most business sites the right kind keeps one language per page, linked to its translation, which is what Google asks for anyway. The existing site carries on around it.

Two cautions from the same documentation. “Installing a multilingual plugin is a big change for any site”, so try it on a copy first and back up the database; our guide to revamping a website without taking it offline covers working on a staging copy. And translation multiplies the database: its example is a WooCommerce shop with 100,000 products that “will have 500,000 records after translating to 5 languages”. For a ten-page company site that is irrelevant; for a shop with thousands of products, it is a hosting question.

A rebuild is the honest answer only when the platform cannot give each language its own address, or cannot switch the forms and emails with the pages. Check that before paying for any translation; if it fails, our guide to choosing between a website revamp and a full rebuild sets out how to weigh the two.

Frequently asked questions

Where iRevamps fits

Adding a language is a revamp job, not a rebuild. The site keeps its platform, its addresses and its English pages, and gains a second set of pages built to the rules above. Our website revamp service starts with two lists: the pages worth translating, and the people who will answer in each language. Translation is paid for only once both are settled.