Knowledge
Dutch or English website?
The question every international founder in the Netherlands asks, usually in week one. The answer follows from a single variable: the language your customers search in.
Updated 12 August 2026
The short answer
Choose the language of your buyers’ searches. Dutch consumers and most Dutch SMEs search and buy in Dutch — serve them Dutch pages. International B2B, expats and tech audiences often search in English — English works, and is sometimes even expected. Many businesses win with both: a bilingual site where each language has full pages, connected by hreflang so google.nl shows Dutch pages to Dutch searches and English pages to English ones. The losing move is the middle path: one language awkwardly serving the other’s audience.
The trust economics of language
“Yes, Dutch people speak English” is true and beside the point: buying happens in the language of comfort. A Dutch consumer comparing two plumbers clicks the Dutch site; a Dutch office manager choosing a caterer forwards the Dutch quote. Meanwhile a Berlin CTO evaluating your SaaS reads English as the professional default. Language is a market signal — pick the signal your buyers reward, per audience.
The bilingual build, done properly
A serious bilingual site is two full experiences rather than one site with a translate button: every page exists in both languages, URLs are separated (/ for Dutch, /en/ for English, as this site does), hreflang tags pair each Dutch page with its English twin, and the copy is written per language rather than translated word-for-word. Search engines then index both cleanly, each audience lands in its own language, and the duplicate-content question is settled by design.
Frequently asked questions
Can I launch in English first and add Dutch later?
A sensible sequence for expat-facing and international niches: launch English, validate, then add the Dutch layer to unlock the mainstream market. Build the URL structure for two languages from day one — retrofitting is the expensive version.
Is machine translation good enough for the Dutch side?
As a draft, yes; as published copy, it shows — and Dutch readers spot it instantly, which costs the exact trust the Dutch version was meant to buy. Native-grade editing is the difference between “translated” and “local”. We write or supervise the Dutch side for precisely this reason.
Which language should lead for a Dutch BV serving both markets?
Let revenue decide the default: the language of your biggest audience takes the root domain, the other lives in its own section. A Dutch-market BV typically leads Dutch with /en/ beside it — the structure of the site you are reading now.
Further reading
Free advice
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