Most "bilingual" websites are an English website with a translate button. It looks like both languages are handled. In practice one language is a real website and the other is a costume.
If you sell in Ottawa, to the federal government, or to customers on both sides of the river in Gatineau, the difference matters commercially. Here is what proper bilingual actually involves.
The plugin problem
The tempting shortcut is a translation plugin or widget: one site, a language switcher, text swapped on the fly.
The reason this hurts you is not quality of translation. It is that the French version often has no address of its own. If yoursite.com/services shows French only after a visitor clicks a button, then as far as a search engine is concerned there is one English page. Nothing exists for a French speaker to find in the first place.
You end up invisible in French while believing you are covered.
What a proper bilingual site has
Separate addresses for each language. /en/services and /fr/services, or a French subdomain. Each version is a real page that can be indexed, linked to and shared.
Correct language tagging. Each page declares its language, and each declares where its counterpart lives. This is the hreflang relationship, and it is what stops the two versions competing against each other in search. When it is missing or half-configured, search engines often ignore the whole arrangement, which is worse than not doing it.
A canonical version per language. The French page points at itself as the definitive French version, not at the English one. Getting this backwards quietly tells Google the French page is a duplicate.
Everything translated, not just the marketing text. This is where most bilingual sites fall apart. The headline is French, and then the navigation, the form labels, the validation errors, the cookie banner, the confirmation message and the 404 page are all English. A visitor filling in a form in French and getting an English error is being told, politely, that they are an afterthought.
Metadata in both languages. Titles and descriptions are what people see in search results. Untranslated ones lose the click before the page is ever loaded.
Translation quality, honestly
Machine translation has become good enough for a first draft and is still not good enough to publish unreviewed for a business that wants to be taken seriously in Quebec or in francophone Ontario.
The specific risk is not gibberish, it is subtle wrongness: European French vocabulary where Canadian French is expected, formal register where the market is informal, and terminology that is simply not what the industry uses locally. It reads as foreign in a way that is hard to point at and easy to feel.
The practical middle ground most businesses land on: machine draft, human review by someone who works in the target market, and the sales-critical pages written properly rather than translated at all.
What it costs
Expect a bilingual build to add meaningfully to a project, though less than doubling it. The structure is built once and serves both languages. What you are paying for is the translation itself, the review, the extra design work where French text runs longer than English (it usually does, and it breaks button layouts), and the additional testing.
Where the cost climbs is retrofitting. Adding a second language to a site that was never structured for it is often close to rebuilding it. If there is any chance you will need French later, say so at the start, even if you are not translating anything yet. Building the structure now and filling it in later is dramatically cheaper than doing it in reverse.
Do you actually need it?
Not everyone does, and it is worth being honest rather than sold.
Strong case: you sell to federal departments or agencies, you serve Ottawa-Gatineau, you sell in Quebec, or your customer base is meaningfully francophone. Also worth considering if your competitors are English-only and you want a market they are ignoring.
Weaker case: you are a local service business in a predominantly anglophone part of Ontario and your customers have never asked. A half-maintained French section is worse than none, because it goes stale and signals carelessness.
One thing to note: this article is about building and finding a website, not about legal obligations. Language requirements can apply to specific organizations and sectors, and Quebec has its own regime. If you think a rule might bind you, ask a lawyer rather than a web studio.
The test
Open your own site, switch it to French, and try to do the thing a customer would do. Fill in the contact form. Trigger an error by leaving a field blank. Reach the confirmation page.
If any part of that journey drops back into English, you have an English site with a French coat of paint, and your French-speaking customers noticed before you did.
We build bilingual from the structure up, and we are happy to look at what you have now and tell you which of the pieces above are missing.