Running a Website in Both Nepali and English

The short answer

Do not add Nepali because it seems like the right thing to do. Add it because you know who reads it and you have someone to write it. A half-translated site is worse than a confident English one, and an auto-translated site is worse than both.

The uncomfortable fact for most Nepali businesses selling to other businesses is that their buyers search in English. Check before you commit to maintaining two of everything.

Check the demand before you build the machinery

Look at your Search Console query data and count how many searches that reached you were in Devanagari. For a lot of B2B and technology businesses the answer is none, and that is a real answer, not a measurement error. Nepali professionals routinely search in English even when they speak Nepali all day.

Where Nepali does earn its place: consumer services, government-facing information, health, education, agriculture, anything aimed at an audience outside the Kathmandu English-speaking professional bubble. If that is your audience, translate properly. If it is not, spend the effort elsewhere.

If you are doing it, do it structurally

• Every language needs its own URL. A toggle that swaps text on one URL is invisible to search engines, so the Nepali version can never rank. Use a path prefix or a separate domain.
• Declare it in the HTML. The lang attribute should match what is actually on the page. Saying lang="ne" over English text is a false signal that confuses screen readers as well as crawlers.
• hreflang, reciprocally. Each version points at the others, including itself. If the pointing is not mutual, search engines ignore it.
• Real links between versions. A language switcher built from a dropdown with JavaScript gives crawlers nothing to follow. It needs to be anchors with real URLs.

That last point is not theoretical. We had exactly that on this site: a select element whose onchange navigated, and as a result seven language homepages had no inbound links anywhere and reached Google only through the sitemap.

The part that actually costs money

Translation is not the expensive bit. Maintenance is. Every price change, every new service, every blog post now exists twice, and the second copy is the one that silently goes stale.

Decide up front what is bilingual and what is not. It is entirely respectable to translate the ten pages that matter and leave the blog in English. It is not respectable to translate everything once and let half of it drift out of date for two years.

Machine translation

Google's position on automatically translated content without human review is that it is spam, and the quality in Nepali is not good enough to pass unnoticed anyway. Devanagari also brings its own technical problems in fonts, search and sorting, which we covered in handling Devanagari text.

If you cannot fund a human translator for the pages that matter, the honest answer is to stay in English and do that well.

Frequently asked questions

Should my business website be in Nepali?

Only if your customers search in Nepali. Check your own query data first. Many Nepali businesses find their audience searches in English, in which case a Nepali version is maintenance with no return.

Is a language toggle enough?

Not for search. If both languages live on one URL, only one can be indexed. Each language needs its own address.

Can I use Google Translate on my site?

As a convenience for visitors, it is their choice to make. As indexable pages you publish, no. Automatically translated content without review is against Google's guidelines and reads badly to the people you are trying to serve.

Does a Nepali version help me rank?

Only for Nepali-language queries that people actually type. It does nothing for your English rankings, and a thin duplicate can dilute them.

What about .com.np instead?

Different question. A domain signals geography, not language. See choosing a domain and what .com.np really costs.