Most businesses outside Quebec assume the province's language rules are somebody else's problem. The law does not read that way. It applies to anyone conducting business in Quebec, in person or online, whether or not they have an office there.
If you ship to Montreal, take enquiries from Quebec City, or run ads that reach the province, this concerns you.
What the law actually requires of a website
Quebec treats a commercial website aimed at the province as commercial publication, and commercial publication has to be available in French.
Three requirements do most of the work.
- A French version has to exist and it has to be genuinely equivalent, not a cut down summary with a phone number on it.
- French must be at least as prominent as any other language. Not buried behind a flag icon in the footer while English is the default experience.
- You cannot require English to transact. If a customer can buy, book or enquire in English, they must be able to do the same in French, all the way through.
That last one catches people who translate the marketing pages and forget the checkout, the confirmation email, and the error messages.
Equivalent means equivalent
The standard is not that French exists somewhere. It is that a French speaking customer gets the same experience.
Same pages. Same product descriptions. Same detail. If the English site has twelve service pages and the French site has three, that is not compliant, and more practically it tells a French speaking customer exactly how much you value their business.
This is why machine translation is a poor answer here twice over. It reads badly, and it usually produces something that is technically present but obviously lesser.
The deadline that arrived
Businesses with more than 25 employees have had to register with the Office québécois de la langue française and document their francization status, with the threshold and reporting obligations tightening as of June 2026. If you are near that headcount and doing business in Quebec, that is a conversation for your legal advisor rather than your web developer, but it changes the urgency of the website side.
What this costs, realistically
Less than most people fear, if you plan it. Considerably more if you retrofit.
A site built with two languages in mind from the start carries maybe 20 to 30 percent more design and build effort, plus translation. A site built in English and made bilingual two years later often needs restructuring, because the content model assumed one language and the URLs, navigation and templates all have to change.
If Quebec is anywhere in your plans, decide now rather than later. That is the whole of the advice.
The technical parts that get missed
Separate URLs per language. Something like /fr/services and /en/services. Not a language switcher that swaps text on the same URL, because search engines cannot index a page that changes based on a cookie.
Hreflang tags telling search engines these two URLs are the same page in different languages. Without them your French pages may be treated as duplicates. This sits inside technical SEO.
Everything the customer touches. Forms, validation messages, date formats, confirmation emails, receipts, the 404 page. The website flipping to French while the order confirmation arrives in English is the seam customers notice.
Do not auto redirect by location. Detect and offer, then remember the choice. Forcing a French speaker in Toronto onto an English site, or an English speaker in Montreal onto a French one, irritates both.
Where French is genuinely optional
If you have no Quebec customers, no Quebec advertising and no intention of either, English alone is fine. Plenty of businesses in Alberta or British Columbia are in exactly that position.
The trap is the middle: a business that gets occasional Quebec orders, has never thought about it, and would rather not find out the hard way. If Quebec is even a small share of your revenue, the honest answer is that the requirement applies.
See how we work with Canadian businesses, or tell us where your customers are and we will give you a straight answer on whether this affects you.
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