Bilingual Websites in Czechia: EN + CS Done Right

The Czech Statistical Office counts more than a million foreigners living in the country, and in Prague roughly one resident in five holds a foreign passport. If your customers include any of them (or any tourists, relocating employees, or foreign B2B buyers), an English version of your site isn’t a nice-to-have. But a second language done badly is worse than none: it leaks trust, splits your Google rankings, and doubles your maintenance bill. Here’s how to do EN + CS properly.

First decision: where does each language live?

Before anyone writes a word, decide the URL structure. It’s the hardest thing to change later, so get it right on day one.

Structure	Example	Best for	Watch out for
Subfolders	example.cz/en/	Almost everyone	Needs clean routing, one sitemap
Subdomains	en.example.cz	Rarely justified	Google treats it as a semi-separate site
Two domains	example.cz + example.com	Genuinely separate markets	Two SEO budgets, two everything

For a Czech business with an English audience, subfolders win in roughly nine cases out of ten. All authority accumulates on one domain, you manage one hosting account, and a .cz domain is a ranking and trust signal in the Czech market, including for English-speaking residents, who quickly learn that .cz means “actually local”.

One more choice inside that: which language sits at the root? Put your primary revenue language at example.cz/ and the secondary one in the folder. A Vinohrady café living off expat brunch traffic can justify English at the root with Czech at /cs/; a plumbing firm in Brno should do the opposite. What you should never do is decide by IP address and redirect visitors automatically. A Czech person on holiday in Spain still wants the Czech version, and Google’s crawler (which mostly visits from US addresses) may never see your Czech pages at all. Offer a visible switcher, remember the choice, and let people choose. This is exactly the kind of structural decision we settle in the first week of a web design project, because retrofitting it costs more than building it right.

Hreflang, explained in plain words

Hreflang is the technical heart of a bilingual site, and it’s simpler than the name suggests. It’s a set of tags telling Google: “this page exists in Czech here and in English there. Show each searcher the right one.”

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="cs" href="https://example.cz/cs/sluzby/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.cz/services/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.cz/services/" />

Three rules cover 95% of what goes wrong:

1. Tags must be reciprocal. If the Czech page points to the English one, the English page must point back. One-way tags are ignored entirely. This is the single most common hreflang bug we find in audits.
2. Point to real, equivalent pages. The Czech services page links to the English services page, not to the English homepage. If a page has no translation, it gets no hreflang for that language. Don’t fake it.
3. Set an x-default. That’s the fallback for searchers in every other language, usually your English version.

Without hreflang, Google may show your Czech page to an English searcher (who bounces), or treat the two versions as competing pages and rank both weakly. With it, each version ranks in its own language market. It’s a one-time setup on a well-built site and a standard part of any serious technical SEO scope. If a quote doesn’t mention it, ask why.

Machine translation is cheap in all the wrong ways

The tempting shortcut: write the Czech, run it through a translation plugin, ship both. Here’s what that actually buys you.

Trust damage first. English readers spot machine output within a sentence or two: calques like “we will solve it with you”, menus where “Domů” became “Home page” but the button next to it stayed Czech, formal constructions no native would write. Research on e-commerce behaviour keeps landing on the same conclusion: roughly three in four buyers prefer to buy in their own language, and a large share won’t buy at all from a site that gets it visibly wrong. A half-translated site signals half-hearted service.

Then rankings. Since Google’s 2024 spam policy updates, auto-generated content published at scale without human review is explicitly named as abuse. Whole subfolders of raw machine translation are exactly the pattern it targets, so you risk the English section quietly never ranking, which means the money you spent on the plugin bought you nothing.

The honest middle ground in 2026: machine translation as a first draft, then a native-level human rewriting every page, fixing tone, idiom, currency formats, and the things translation can’t know (that “IČO” needs explaining to a foreigner, that “gift voucher” beats “gift certificate” for a European audience). That human pass is the actual cost of the second language. Budget for it or skip the language entirely; the in-between is the worst of both.

Expats and locals are not the same reader

A true bilingual site is not one text in two languages: the audiences arrive with different questions.

Czech visitors check whether you’re legitimate: IČO in the footer, Czech phone number, transparent pricing in CZK, delivery via Zásilkovna, payment through Comgate or GoPay, dobírka if you’re an e-shop. They skim quickly and distrust superlatives.

English-speaking residents ask more basic, and more anxious, questions: Do you speak English on the phone, or only on the website? Can the invoice or contract be issued in English? Do prices include VAT? How does delivery work if I don’t know what a “výdejní místo” is? The English version that answers these directly will convert dramatically better than a mirror translation of the Czech marketing copy. Two or three English-specific FAQ entries routinely outperform a whole translated page.

So allow the versions to diverge. Same offer, same prices, same structure, but each written for the person actually reading it.

The Seznam question

Roughly a tenth of Czech searches still happen on Seznam.cz, and its users skew toward exactly the older, Czech-first demographic that many local businesses live on. Three things to know:

• Seznam is Czech-only in practice. Your English pages are irrelevant to it; your Czech pages are everything. If the Czech version is the afterthought, you’re invisible to a chunk of the local market.
• SeznamBot is less forgiving than Google. A language switcher that only works via JavaScript, or Czech content hidden behind client-side rendering, can leave Seznam seeing nothing. Server-rendered static pages, the way we build, are indexed without drama.
• Register in Firmy.cz. It’s free, it feeds Seznam’s local results and maps, and most businesses never bother. Fifteen minutes, real visibility.

None of this changes your architecture; it just means the Czech version must be a first-class citizen, not a translated shadow.

What a second language actually costs in 2026

Real numbers for a typical 6–8 page presentation site, so nothing in a quote surprises you:

Item	One-time cost	Note
Human translation (agency, per standard page)	CZK 400 – 700	A site this size is 10–15 standard pages of text
Transcreation / native copywriting	CZK 8,000 – 20,000	The version that actually sells
Technical setup (routing, hreflang, sitemaps, switcher)	CZK 3,000 – 8,000	Near zero if the site was built bilingual from day one
Ongoing: every future edit	×2	The cost everyone forgets

As a rule of thumb, a properly executed second language adds 15–25% to the build price: on a CZK 25,000 presentation site, plan around CZK 30,000 for a genuinely bilingual one. (For context on the base numbers, see our breakdown of what websites cost in Prague.) The line that matters most is the last one: every blog post, price change, and seasonal banner now exists twice. Decide up front whether the whole site goes bilingual or only the pages foreign customers actually need. Often the homepage, services, pricing, and contact in English are worth more than fifty translated blog posts nobody asked for.

The short version

Subfolders on one .cz domain. Reciprocal hreflang with an x-default. A visible language switcher and no forced redirects. Machine translation only as a draft, a native human on every published page. Czech written for Czech trust signals, English written for expat questions. Seznam fed with server-rendered Czech and a Firmy.cz listing. And a maintenance plan that covers both languages, because the site you launch is the site you’ll be editing for years.

We build bilingual and trilingual sites this way as standard. This site runs in three languages on the same architecture. If you’re weighing an English version of your website, tell us what you sell and who buys it, and we’ll reply within 24 hours with a concrete plan and a fixed price.