Planning a multilingual website for Switzerland.

Decide coverage by where your customers are, not by habit

German, French and Italian are official languages, but that doesn't mean every business needs all three plus English on day one — a Zurich practice with occasional French-speaking patients needs a different answer than a Ticino hospitality business.

• DE + EN — most B2B and tech-facing businesses
• DE + FR — businesses near the Röstigraben or with national reach
• DE + FR + EN — larger regional or national operations
• IT-first — businesses based in Ticino

Translate the decision, not just the sentence

Keep pricing claims, guarantees, legal terms and calls-to-action word-for-word equivalent across languages, while still allowing natural terminology in each market — machine translation gets the words right and the register wrong often enough to cost trust.

Give every language its own reviewer

Assign one person accountable for factual accuracy in each language before publication, separate from whoever wrote the source text. A claim that's true in German can quietly become false in French if a number or date gets mistranslated.

Decide the URL and switching pattern early

Fully localized URLs — a distinct slug per language, not a query parameter — are better for search visibility per language, and the language switcher needs to land visitors on the equivalent page in the new language, not always the homepage.