The test is one sentence: which language does the person who pays use when they look for a supplier. Whether the owner speaks English, or whether the card prints EN, is secondary.
Customers, tenders, hiring, and franchising are all domestic. Export is an occasional question. You have no English source copy and no reviewer. Forcing bilingual pages leaves machine translation up for months, which hurts more than having no English.
A stable share of orders is overseas. You attend foreign shows. You win work on email and Google. Buyers want CE/FDA and English datasheets. No English pages means sales fights the whole search habit with attachments and chat.
Bilingual is not two unrelated sites. It is one information architecture and two copy sets. Model numbers, certificate IDs, and lead-time language must match, or buyers will use the Chinese page against the English one. The same playbook rule applies to language. See How the Website Becomes the Sales Team's Shared Playbook.
Do not launch machine translation as-is. A person must review navigation, units (mm/inch), certificate names, and form fields. The inquiry form must accept English and notify a role inbox.
Put language switch where it is obvious and remember the choice. Do not hide English as a tiny EN in the footer. A separate English domain versus /en/ on the same domain depends on brand and campaigns. Smaller companies usually spend less with /en/.
Host and speed should follow where buyers sit. ICP-only hosting in China with a slow overseas open makes the English site a prop. Infrastructure: Domain, Hosting, and ICP Filing: Traps Companies Hit First. What the export homepage should say: What an Export Inquiry Homepage Should Say and Why Exporters Need a Standalone Website Even More.
On budget, bilingual nearly doubles content work. Design can be reused. Timeline: cost and timeline.
The worst bilingual sites from smaller firms look acceptable in Chinese and fully machine-translated in English: wrong certificate names, mixed units, a submit button still labeled in Chinese. Buyers conclude you have never really exported, even if you have. Confirm three things first: who supplies English product names (they must match packaging and contracts), who reviews, and who answers English inquiries. Without the third person, leads arrive and die. The site becomes “look, don’t talk.”
You can stage it: phase one English only on the main line and contact; About stays Chinese until inquiries prove the case. Do not be complete for completeness. How the .com and the ICP domain point at each other belongs in the plan, so you do not launch slow or with certificate errors. See domain and ICP filing. DaXi asks for a named reviewer on bilingual sites so nobody is afraid to edit English after launch. To judge whether you need English, go to the corporate website service page and say where customers are. Export homepage copy: What an Export Inquiry Homepage Should Say.
A middle path: English only as PDF datasheets, site still Chinese. That covers old-customer email. It does not cover a new buyer’s first search. If you still want stranger inquiries from Google, page-level English is not optional. Budget translation. Do not hire an intern after launch.
Remember the language choice and show in the inquiry email whether they used Chinese or English, so sales does not reply in the wrong language. Small detail. It decides whether the first reply looks like a company that has exported.
English news is optional. If nobody will write it, do not machine-translate domestic event posts. Empty is more professional than wrong tense. Spend the effort on product pages and inquiries.
Lead generation, brand, franchising, or due diligence — the goal changes the navigation and the first screen. Send your current situation and goal; engineering will come back with a plan you can execute.