Bilingual Websites in Luxembourg: A Practical hreflang Guide

Luxembourg is one of the few places where a “bilingual website” is the baseline rather than an ambition. English and French is the usual pair, with German and Luxembourgish close behind depending on who you serve. Done well, a multilingual site reaches each audience in the language they search in. Done badly, it halves your visibility and doubles your maintenance. This guide covers the decisions that matter, in the order you will meet them.

Start with the audience, not the languages

Before the technical choices, be honest about who searches for you and how. Institutional clients in Luxembourg’s financial sector largely work in English. Local SMEs, the public sector and consumers lean French, and German for the north and the Greater Region. Luxembourgish is usually a courtesy rather than a search strategy.

Pick the primary language for the content you will keep most current, and make the other versions complete rather than numerous. One excellent English site with a complete French mirror beats four partial ones.

Choose a URL structure and keep it

Search engines need a distinct, stable URL for every language version. In practice you have three options.

• Subfolders (pointamarketing.com/fr/…). One domain, one authority profile, simple hosting. This is the right default for almost every Luxembourg business and the structure we use on our own site.
• Subdomains (fr.example.com). Technically separate properties that split authority and complicate analytics. Rarely worth it.
• Country domains (example.lu, example.fr). Useful when you run genuinely separate businesses per country. Overkill for one organisation speaking two languages.

Whatever you choose, do not switch languages with a cookie, a browser setting or JavaScript on the same URL. Crawlers see one version, users cannot share the other, and your hreflang has nothing to point at.

Localise the slugs, or not, deliberately

/fr/services and /fr/nos-realisations both work. Translated slugs read better and can carry French keywords; untranslated slugs are simpler to maintain and map one-to-one across languages. Either is fine. Mixing them without a rule is not, because every redirect, sitemap and hreflang entry depends on knowing the pairs.

Implement hreflang correctly

hreflang tells search engines which pages are translations of each other and which language and region each targets. The rules are simple and routinely broken.

1. Every version lists every version, including itself. The English page references the French page and the English page; the French page does the same. Missing return links invalidate the pair.
2. Use absolute URLs and the final canonical URL, not a redirecting one.
3. Use the right codes. en or en-LU, fr or fr-LU. Region codes are optional; language codes are not. lu on its own is a country, not a language.
4. Add x-default pointing at the version you want shown when no language matches, usually the English home page.
5. Match canonicals. Each page’s canonical must point to itself, never to the other language.

In a code-based build this is generated from one source of truth, so pairs cannot drift. On a platform or a hand-maintained site it is worth auditing every quarter.

Translate the whole page, not just the paragraphs

The parts of a page most often left in the wrong language are the parts search engines weight most heavily.

• Title tag and meta description.
• Open Graph tags, so a shared French link previews in French.
• Image alt text and captions.
• Structured data: the name, description and inLanguage of your Organization, WebPage and FAQ nodes.
• Form labels, validation messages, buttons and the cookie banner.
• Legal pages. A French-speaking visitor should not meet an English privacy policy.

A page that is half French and half English reads as careless to people and as ambiguous to crawlers.

Keep both sitemaps and both feeds honest

Your XML sitemap should list every language URL, each with its alternates. If you publish articles, decide whether your RSS feed is per language or primary language only, and say so. Our insights feed is English only by design; the French versions are linked from each article instead.

Measure by language

Report search performance per language folder, not per site. A site that is “up 20%” may be an English page gaining while the French one quietly drops out of the index. Search Console filters by URL prefix; set the views up on day one.

Common mistakes we fix most often

• Machine-translated pages published without review.
• The French page canonicalised to the English one “to avoid duplicate content”, which removes it from search entirely.
• A language switcher that always sends visitors to the other language’s home page instead of the equivalent page.
• English-only 404 and thank-you pages.
• hreflang on the home page only.

How this connects to the rest of your site

A bilingual site is cheaper and safer to run when the languages share one design system, one content model and one build. That is the approach behind our web development work, and it is one of the main factors in what a website costs in Luxembourg. If you are deciding whether your current site can carry a second language or needs rebuilding first, the redesign vs rebuild checklist is the place to start.