The Quebec Context
Two Laws Shape Every Montreal Website
Quebec is the one market in North America where a website's language and privacy setup is regulated in detail. A WordPress build for Montreal has to be scoped around both laws from day one, not patched afterwards.
Bill 96: the Charter of the French Language online
Source: Trew Knowledge, Quebec's Bill 96: What It Means for Company Websites and Digital Strategy, 2025
Websites, e-commerce flows, form labels, error messages and automated emails aimed at Quebec customers must be available in French. That includes sellers based outside the province who market to Quebec consumers.
The French version cannot be slower, thinner or harder to find than the English one. A partial machine translation buried in a footer menu does not meet the standard.
Each day a non-compliant site stays live can count as a separate offense, and the OQLF now has powers to inspect businesses proactively instead of acting only on complaints. On June 1, 2025, registration duties were extended to companies with 25 or more Quebec employees.
Law 25: Quebec's privacy law
Source: CookieHub, Quebec Law 25 cookie consent guide, 2026
Analytics and marketing cookies must stay off until the visitor actively turns them on. Pre-checked boxes and consent by continued browsing are not valid, and under Bill 96 the consent banner itself must also work in French.
Law 25 was phased in between 2022 and 2024 and applies to any organisation handling Quebec residents' personal data, including companies based outside the province.
Administrative penalties reach CAD 10 million or 2 percent of worldwide turnover, whichever is higher, and penal fines go up to CAD 25 million or 4 percent for serious offenses, enforced by the Commission d'acces a l'information.
Montreal by the numbers
Montreal is a genuinely bilingual market inside a francophone province, and WordPress remains the platform most of its small businesses build on.
A Montreal WordPress project is not just design and code. It is a compliance exercise in two languages, and the sites that pass an OQLF inspection are the ones that treated French as a first-class version, not a translation bolted on at the end.
What WordPress Work Costs in MontrealBudget Benchmarks
Published 2025 benchmarks for Montreal web projects, in Canadian dollars. Source: Clevr Solutions, How Much Does Web Design Cost in Montreal, 2025 pricing guide.
| Feature | Typical Montreal range (CAD) | What drives the price |
|---|---|---|
| Agency hourly rate | ||
| Small business website, 5 to 10 pages | ||
| Mid-range agency project | ||
| French and English translation and localisation | ||
| Bilingual site maintenance |
| Feature | Typical Montreal range (CAD) |
|---|---|
| Agency hourly rate | |
| Small business website, 5 to 10 pages | |
| Mid-range agency project | |
| French and English translation and localisation | |
| Bilingual site maintenance |
What We Build for Montreal Businesses
Every engagement is scoped around the two things a Quebec website cannot get wrong: language parity and privacy consent. Everything else is craft.
Bilingual WordPress architecture
WPML and Polylang done properly We build French and English versions on WPML, which runs on more than 1.5 million sites, or on Polylang, which has over 800,000 active installations (WPML.org and WordPress.org figures, 2026). The choice depends on your budget and editorial workflow. Every string, menu, form and email template exists in both languages, with French URLs and correct hreflang tags.
Bill 96 parity builds
French as a first-class version The law requires French on terms no less favourable than English. We build both language trees with equal depth, equal speed and equal prominence, so the French experience is not a shortened copy that invites a complaint to the OQLF.
Law 25 consent layer
Opt-in, in both languages We implement a bilingual consent banner where analytics and marketing scripts stay blocked until the visitor opts in, with no pre-checked boxes and a working withdraw option. Your GA4, Meta pixel and heatmap tools fire only after consent.
WooCommerce in two languages
Checkout that speaks French Product pages, cart, checkout, confirmation emails and error messages translated end to end, with Canadian dollar pricing and Quebec tax handling. Under Bill 96, the transactional flow is part of the compliance surface, not just the marketing pages.
Performance and Core Web Vitals
Fast in both language trees Bilingual plugins can double your page count and slow a site down if configured lazily. We benchmark Core Web Vitals on the French and English versions separately, because a slow French site is both a ranking problem and a parity problem.
Care plans and content sync
Both versions stay current The most common failure we see on bilingual sites is drift: English gets updated, French falls behind. Our maintenance workflow treats an update as unfinished until both language versions ship.
How We Work
A Delhi Team on Montreal Time
How a Bilingual Build Runs
The same sequence whether we are rebuilding your site or retrofitting French onto an existing English one.
- 1Discovery and compliance scope
We audit your current site against Bill 96 and Law 25: which templates lack French, where consent is missing, what the OQLF exposure actually is. You get the findings in writing, free, before any commitment.
- 2Architecture in both languages
Sitemap and URL structure planned for French and English together, hreflang mapped, and the translation stack chosen: WPML, Polylang, and the split between professional human translation and reviewed machine translation.
- 3Design and build
Custom theme or block-based build in WordPress, with forms, integrations and content entered in both languages as we go rather than translated at the end.
- 4Consent and privacy layer
Bilingual cookie banner, scripts gated on opt-in consent, privacy policy pages in French and English, and a consent log your team can show the regulator if asked.
- 5Bilingual QA and launch
Every template tested in both languages, a parity check on depth and speed, then a structured handover with training for your editors so both versions stay maintained.
Recent Web Development Work
Real projects from our web development team, pulled from our live case study library.
+143%
Speed Improvement
McCormick & Company
Within one sprint cycle, desktop Google PageSpeed Insights score rose from 35 to 85 — a 143% improvement. Mobile score moved from below 40 to 75. C...
24h
Order dispatch
GRYT Health Labs
The launched site reads as a focused, conversion-first shop rather than a catalogue dump. Because it is a custom Laravel build, the cart, checkout...
Daddy of Tastes
The launched storefront gives customers a quick path from category to dish detail to cart, with offers and ratings visible where they aid the decis...
Instacertify
The site reads as a single command center for certification, with search and clear calls to action giving buyers an obvious first step. The card-dr...
Northern Tile Distributors
The storefront gives Northern Tile Distributors a clean way to present deep tile and timber ranges so builders can scan collections quickly and che...
Raa Logistics
The launched site gives Raa Logistics a clean, professional presence that reads well on both desktop and phones, with the quote request and trackin...
Montreal WordPress Questions
If you market or sell to Quebec consumers online, yes. Bill 96 applies to commercial websites serving the Quebec market regardless of where the business sits, and fines run from CAD 3,000 to 30,000 per violation, with each day of non-compliance potentially counted as a separate offense (Trew Knowledge, 2025). The safe assumption for any site that takes Montreal orders is that both laws apply to you.
Both are proven: WPML runs on over 1.5 million sites and Polylang has more than 800,000 active installations. Polylang's free tier suits simpler brochure sites, while WPML's translation management and WooCommerce support fit content-heavy or e-commerce builds. We recommend one only after seeing how your team actually edits content, because the wrong choice creates years of double data entry.
Published Montreal benchmarks put a small business site at CAD 2,500 to 12,000, with professional translation and localisation adding CAD 3,000 to 15,000 on top (Clevr Solutions, 2025). Delivering remotely from Delhi usually lets us come in under local agency rates for the same scope. We give you a fixed quote after the free audit rather than an hourly meter.
Delhi is 9.5 hours ahead of Montreal in summer and 10.5 hours ahead in winter. We schedule calls in your Montreal morning, which is our evening, and do the heavy build work while you are offline. Review and build happen in alternating halves of the day, so the project moves forward while you are offline.
Often, yes. If the theme and plugins are sound, we add the multilingual layer, translate templates and content, and install the Law 25 consent banner without a rebuild. The audit tells us honestly which route is cheaper over a two-year horizon, and we have recommended against rebuilds where retrofitting was the better spend.
Non-essential cookies must be off by default, so GA4, Meta pixel and similar tags fire only after an explicit opt-in, and under Bill 96 the banner must work in French as well. Penalties reach CAD 10 million or 2 percent of global turnover for administrative violations (CookieHub, 2026). Expect reported traffic numbers to dip after compliance; that is the law working, not the site breaking.
Get Your Free Website Audit
Tell us about your site and we will send a concrete, human-written review of its Bill 96 parity, Law 25 consent and performance gaps.
Make Your Montreal Website Work in Both Languages
Get a free audit of your current WordPress site covering French parity, Law 25 consent and Core Web Vitals, with a clear fixed-scope quote to close whatever gaps we find.