An English Version of Your Site: When a Small Business Needs One and What It Costs
An e-mail arrives in English. Someone asks whether you have a free slot in August and whether they can pay by card. You reply, they book, everything works out. But a thought stays with you and comes back every few weeks: if foreign customers are finding me anyway, shouldn’t I have a website in English?
It is a fair question, and the answer is rarely a plain yes or no. A second language version is not a translated file. It is a second website: a second set of copy to write, a second set to keep current, and a second stream of enquiries somebody has to answer in English. Below: when that work pays for itself, how to tell when it will not, what the real numbers look like, and what you get from the middle option of one English page instead of a full version.
When a second version actually earns its keep
There are situations where an English site brings in jobs within a few months. They all share one thing: the customer searches in English, pays in English, and you can actually serve them in that language.
Accommodation and tourism is the obvious case. A guesthouse in Sopot, apartments in Kraków, a guide in Wrocław. A visitor plans the trip from Google, and if nothing on your site makes sense to them, they click the next result.
The second case is services in cities with a large international community. A dentist in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, a physiotherapist in Gdańsk, a language school, an immigration lawyer, an accounting office working with foreign-owned companies. These people have lived in Poland for years and many of them still search for services in English.
The third is exported services, subcontracting and remote work. A carpenter building fitted furniture for a client in Berlin, a CNC shop taking drawings from Czechia, an installation crew travelling for contracts, bookkeeping for foreign companies, design, IT. Here the English site is less a source of Google traffic than something you send in reply to an enquiry, to prove there is a real business behind the e-mail address.
When it is money down the drain
A plumber in Piaseczno does not need an English version. Neither does a hair salon with three chairs in Radom. If your customers live within twenty kilometres and speak Polish, a second version adds work and not a single phone call.
The second warning sign is the reasoning „just in case” or „it will look more serious”. What looks serious is a current website, not one with an EN tab where the price list is two years old.
The third is the most practical. If nobody in the company will pick up the phone in English, the English version is selling something you do not deliver. The enquiry arrives, goes unanswered, and ends worse than if it had never come.
There is a fourth case, less obvious. If the Polish version has no content, is not in Google and brings no enquiries, adding a second language multiplies the problem by two.
Check two things before you decide
It takes a quarter of an hour and saves a few hundred zloty.
In Google Search Console, open „Performance”, set the range to three months and look at the „Countries” tab, then the list of queries. If anyone reaches you through English-language phrases, you will see them there, even on an entirely Polish site. We covered how to read those reports in Google Search Console in plain language.
The second check needs no tools at all: count how many English enquiries you received in the past six months and how many turned into work. Three messages a year is not a market. Two a week is a signal worth costing out properly.
Machine translation versus copy written from scratch
Automatic translation is good these days and there is no point pretending otherwise. The problem sits somewhere other than grammar.
Customers notice the seams. Polish marketing phrases translated literally read like leaflet copy no native speaker would produce. Then there are the things a translation engine does not know: that amounts need a currency next to them, that opening hours written as 8:00-16:00 read differently than 8am to 4pm, and that an address without a country name is useless to someone abroad.
Google sees something else. Search engines do not automatically penalise machine translation, but they do judge the result, and the result is usually copy aimed at Polish phrases carried over word for word. A Polish customer types „remont mieszkania Warszawa”; someone searching in English types „apartment renovation Warsaw” or „flat refurbishment Warsaw”. Those are two different word lists. A translated page can be linguistically correct and invisible in search at the same time.
The practical split works like this. If the English version only needs to serve customers who already found you, machine translation edited by someone who knows the language is enough. If it is supposed to win traffic from Google, it has to be written from scratch around English queries, which is closer to copywriting than to translation.
The technical part: separate addresses, not a toggle
The most common mistake is a language version that exists only in the browser. You click a flag, the text swaps, and the address bar stays exactly the same.
| Setup | What the customer sees | What Google sees |
|---|---|---|
| A toggle that swaps text at the same address | two versions | one page, usually in one language only |
Separate addresses, e.g. /en/services/ | two versions | two pages, each able to rank on its own phrases |
A separate domain, e.g. company.com next to company.pl | two sites | two independent sites, authority built from zero |
For a small business, separate addresses inside one domain make the most sense. On top of that comes hreflang, a tag in the code that tells the search engine: „this page has a counterpart at this address, meant for English”. Without it, Google can treat both versions as competing copies and show whichever it feels like.
One thing worth skipping: redirecting visitors automatically based on their browser language. A Polish customer with an English-language phone lands on EN and cannot find the way back. A visible switcher pointing to a different address works better.
The double work starts after launch
The build cost is one-off and everyone sees it. The upkeep cost is quiet, and it decides whether the English version still helps anyone a year later.
Every price change is two changes. Holiday hours, a new person on the team, project photos, a blog post, a privacy policy updated after a legal change: all of it times two. The list of things you have to keep an eye on in a single version is already longer than most people expect, and we went through it in what to keep updated on your website.
The typical picture after twelve months: the Polish version is alive, the English one is frozen, prices have drifted apart, and a customer abroad gets a quote that does not match what they hear on the phone. That is worse than having no second version, because it undermines trust at the moment it was supposed to be built.
What the numbers look like
The ranges below are indicative market rates for translation and copy, not our price list. For a typical business site of five to eight pages, the bill works out roughly like this.
| Item | Range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Translation by a translator | PLN 60-120 per 1,800 characters | a whole site is usually 6-10 such units |
| Copy written in English from scratch | PLN 150-400 per page | the version built for Google traffic, not for decoration |
| Building the second version | PLN 400-1500 | addresses, switcher, hreflang, menu |
| Yearly upkeep | your time, or PLN 300-800 | content updates times two |
So the order of magnitude runs from a few hundred zloty for the translation alone to several thousand for a version written for search. It is worth putting that next to the price of the site itself: at Sitario a business website on the Start plan costs PLN 249 once, including the first year of hosting, and renewal from year two starts at PLN 149 a year. Done properly, the second language version can cost several times more than the site you are adding it to. That is not an argument against it, just a reason to check those two numbers from the earlier section first.
The middle option: one page in English
For most small businesses this is the right answer. Instead of translating eight pages, you build one good page at an address like /en/ and link to it from the menu.
What belongs on it: who you are and what you do in two sentences, the area you cover with town names, your services without jargon, prices at least as a range, how to get in touch, and, importantly, which language you reply in and speak on the phone. If you serve customers abroad, add a line about payment and invoicing, because that question is coming anyway. The writing rules are the same as for the main version, and we set them out in what to write on a business website.
A page like that can be sent as a link in an e-mail and it does not create double work, because the only things you update on it are prices and contact details. If after six months your statistics show people arriving on it from search, you have solid grounds for adding more.
How this works with us, and when we are not the answer
Sitario builds a done-for-you site in one language. You describe your business in a form, in about an hour you look at the finished site, and only then do you decide whether to pay. The domain is registered in your name and you can download the site’s source files at any time.
A full bilingual version with parallel addresses, a switcher and hreflang is not part of that model, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. What you can do is add a new page from the panel’s page catalogue, including a plain text page, and write it in English: the middle option described above. A site holds up to twelve pages, so there is room.
If your business genuinely stands on two markets and both versions have to be equals, you need someone who will design it that way from the ground up and an editor who will keep both versions current. That is agency work rather than generator work, and it is fairer to say it before the purchase than after.
In short
Before you order a second language version, answer three questions. Does anyone actually search for me in English, going by Search Console and my inbox? Do I have someone who will answer the phone and the e-mail in that language? Can I keep two versions current for the next two years?
Three yeses mean it is worth costing out and doing properly, with separate addresses and copy written around English phrases. A single no means you will do better with one English page and a well-run main version. A site that is current in one language beats two that cannot keep up.