In October 2026, a robot reread the 9,970 websites of the “10,000 Swiss small-business websites” study and noted, page by page, the languages each one is actually written in. Not the language menu: the text. Here is what it found on 8,128 websites, in proportions, without a single name.
of websites speak one language only. Base: 8,128 websites of companies drawn at random from the commercial register, October 2026.
of websites offer English. Another national language than their municipality’s: 12%. Base: 8,128 websites, October 2026.
of websites in the cantons of Fribourg, Bern and Valais offer both languages of their canton. Base: 1,502 websites, October 2026.
of websites do not offer the language of their own municipality, most often because they are in English only. Base: 8,105 websites, October 2026.
of websites declare a different language in their code than the one their text is written in, most often a German page labelled as English (315 of 521 cases). Google and AI assistants then misread who the website is for. Base: 7,545 websites, October 2026.
To cite: Hallebardier (Maxime Perriard), “The languages of Swiss company websites”, October 2026, hallebardier.com/en/swiss-website-language-study/, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23681999. Licence CC BY 4.0. All figures (JSON).
websites reread, those of the “10,000 Swiss small-business websites” study, drawn at random from the commercial register
websites with at least one page written in a recognised language
pages read at most per website: the home page, then one per announced language
margin of error on the national percentages
Share of the 8,128 websites that offer each language, and number of languages per website. A language counts when a page of the website is written in it.
English comes before French and Italian. One website in four offers it, while only one in eight offers a second national language. Romansh appears on a single website.
The language of the municipality of the company’s registered office, according to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office.
| Measure | German-speaking municipality | French-speaking municipality | Italian-speaking municipality | Switzerland |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Websites read | 5,942 | 1,800 | 363 | 8,128 |
| Two languages or more | 17% | 22% | 22% | 18% |
| Another national language | 10% | 15% | 23% | 12% |
| English | 25% | 33% | 36% | 27% |
| Without the municipality’s language | 14% | 19% | 28% | 16% |
| Language misdeclared in the code | 7% | 7% | 10% | 7% |
The smaller the region, the more its websites open up to other languages: about one website in five in French- and Italian-speaking municipalities offers two languages or more, one in six in German-speaking municipalities.
Fribourg, Bern and Valais have two official languages. Share of websites that offer both, by language of the municipality of the registered office.
| Canton and municipality | Websites read | Both canton languages | Another national language | English |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fribourg, French-speaking municipality | 194 | 13% | 20% | 20% |
| Fribourg, German-speaking municipality | 52 | 31% | 33% | 15% |
| Bern, French-speaking municipality | 30 | 23% | 27% | 17% |
| Bern, German-speaking municipality | 705 | 10% | 15% | 17% |
| Valais, French-speaking municipality | 239 | 11% | 13% | 27% |
| Valais, German-speaking municipality | 68 | 19% | 24% | 37% |
In each canton, the language minority translates more often than the majority. In Fribourg, 31% of websites in German-speaking municipalities also speak French, against 13% of websites in French-speaking municipalities the other way round. Below 60 websites, the margin of error exceeds ten points.
By platform, the share of websites in two languages or more ranges from 4% on Jimdo and 15% on Wix to 41% on TYPO3 and 44% on Drupal. WordPress, the most common platform, stands at 18%.
The 9,970 reachable websites of the “10,000 Swiss small-business websites” study: companies drawn at random from the commercial register, in all 26 cantons.
The home page, then one page per other language the website announces (hreflang, language switcher). Five pages at most, one request at a time, without running JavaScript.
A page is written in a language when its visible text holds at least eight function words of that language (les, und, the, della) and the first language weighs twice the second. A language that is announced but not translated does not count. Cookie banners and platform interface text are removed first.
The municipality of each company’s registered office and its language region (Swiss Federal Statistical Office). Proportions only: no name, no website address, no figure for a group of fewer than thirty websites.
The robot identifies itself as HallebardierEtude, reads robots.txt before any other page and respects it. It keeps only language codes and counters, never the text of the pages. Details are on the Privacy page.
All figures, region by region, canton by canton, by legal form and by platform: etude-langues-2026.json. The same data as CSV: GitHub and Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23681999). Licence CC BY 4.0: free reuse, including commercial, with the source and a link to this page.
A language counts when a page is written in it, not when it appears in a menu.
The code as the server sends it, without JavaScript. A translation loaded later by a script is not read.
A website that only translates deep pages may count as one language.
A translation can be there and poor: the study does not judge it.
A company that serves a single market does not necessarily need a second language.
With no list of function words, it only counts through language attributes. It is rare.
A website translated into your clients’ language, and declared correctly to Google and AI assistants, so they find it in their own language.