When companies talk about adding a language to a website, the conversation usually starts with another country. For an American business, that can miss a much closer opportunity.
The market may already be in the United States.
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that just over 74 million people aged five and over speak a language other than English at home. About 44.9 million speak Spanish.
people aged five and over in the United States speak Spanish at home.
That does not mean 44.9 million people need a Spanish website to buy something. It does mean Spanish is part of the domestic market on a scale that is hard to treat as a niche.
The Census Bureau's latest QuickFacts estimate puts the Hispanic or Latino population at 20.5% of the country. For many companies, Spanish is not a question about entering Latin America or Spain. It can be a question about serving customers in the U.S. better.
Being comfortable in English does not make language irrelevant.
Many Spanish-speaking Americans are bilingual. That is sometimes used as a reason to leave the website in English only.
But the useful question is not whether someone can read English. It is whether language changes attention, confidence or preference when they are choosing what to watch, where to shop or which company to contact.
Nielsen's 2026 Hispanic audience report calls the market "two languages, one audience." It found that Hispanic audiences watched more than 2 trillion minutes of television in the first half of 2026. On linear TV, 42% of Hispanic viewing time went to Spanish-language television, even though far more English-language programming was available.
of Hispanic linear TV time went to Spanish-language television in the first half of 2026.
Television viewing is not website conversion data, and it should not be treated as such. What it does show is that bilingual audiences still make meaningful language choices.
Not every U.S. company needs a Spanish version.
A national statistic is not a business case on its own.
The case becomes stronger when Spanish-speaking customers are already buying from the company, when sales teams regularly handle enquiries in Spanish, when a business is expanding in markets where Spanish is widely used, or when a product already has a visible bilingual audience.
Those are much better signals than deciding to translate a site simply because Spanish is widely spoken.
If the market is real, the website should support it. If the market is not there, a new language will not create one by itself.
A Spanish website is more than Spanish copy.
Once the business case is clear, the work stops being a simple translation exercise.
A visitor moves through navigation, service or product pages, forms, internal links and search results. They may switch language midway through a journey. Search engines need to understand which version belongs to which audience.
A translated homepage followed by English forms and English product pages is not a Spanish version of the website. It is a translated page inside an English experience.
This distinction matters because the quality of the language is only one part of the job. The new version also has to work properly.
Start with the market, then decide what the website needs.
Before asking how much of the website should be translated, it is worth answering a few simpler questions.
Who are we trying to reach? Which products or services matter to them? Which pages support a sale? What should appear in search? What happens after someone submits a form?
Those answers define the useful scope far better than a page count.
The point
Your next market may already be around you.
For the right U.S. business, Spanish is not an international expansion project. It is a way to serve part of the American market that is already there.
Data used in this article
U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 American Community Survey, S1601: Language Spoken at Home