What website translation costs, and why nobody puts a number on it

You have a site in one language and you need it in three. You open five pricing pages and every one of them says contact us. So you cannot budget, and the only way to find out is to get on five calls — which is the point.

This page does the opposite. Below are the three ways this work is normally priced, which one is cheapest for a site that does not change much, an arithmetic you can put your own page count into, and at the bottom, our own two numbers.

Per word. The traditional one, and the only one that scales with the actual work. The catch is that you do not know your own word count. A "small" marketing site is usually between 4,000 and 15,000 words once you include the pages nobody thinks of: pricing tables, FAQ, the footer, form labels, error messages, and the meta descriptions.

Per month, per language. The model most website-translation plugins use. It is cheap in month one and it never stops. If your site changes twice a year, you are renting something you already own. Work out the three-year number before you sign: a subscription is the most expensive option for a site that is stable, and the cheapest for one that publishes weekly.

Per project, fixed. One number, one delivery. It is the only one you can put in a budget before you start, and it is the rarest — because it puts the estimating risk on the seller instead of on you.

Count the pages you actually need translated — not the pages on your site. For most businesses this is between 5 and 20: home, what you do, pricing, about, contact, and the handful of posts that bring people in. Then:

• Pages × languages = the unit you are really buying. Five pages into three languages is fifteen page-translations, not five.
• Add the parts that are not page text but still have to be translated: page titles and meta descriptions (they are what shows up in search results), URL slugs, and an hreflang map so search engines know which version to show whom.
• If any target language is right-to-left (Arabic, Hebrew), add a layout check. Text that is correct can still render backwards inside a layout that was never tested for it.

That third bullet is where most quotes quietly differ. A quote for "5 pages, 3 languages" that does not mention titles, meta descriptions, slugs and hreflang is quoting you for less work than you need, and you will find out after launch when the translated pages do not rank.

Two numbers, both on this page, both one-time:

• $299 — up to 5 pages into up to 3 languages.
• $999 — up to 50 pages into up to 6 languages.

Both include the page text, the page titles, the meta descriptions, the URL slugs, an hreflang map, and a right-to-left check — because those are the parts that decide whether the translated pages are findable, and leaving them out is how a cheap quote becomes an expensive one. A person checks the package before it goes out. You never give us a login; we work from an export or from your public pages.

What it is not: it is machine translation with a human check, not certified or legal translation, and putting the files into your site is still your step. That is spelled out in full on the page below, before you pay anything.

See exactly what is in each package

Full refund at any point before delivery.

Also free on this site: an hreflang tag builder — paste your URLs and languages, get the tags. Nothing to install, no sign-up.