Direct answer
If your customers are mostly overseas or expat, no. The answer doesn’t come from whether your business is in Thailand. It comes from who you’re trying to reach. Translate for the customers you have, in the language they search in, not for the country you’re standing in.
The question underneath the question
Most advice on this treats “business in Thailand” as one audience. It isn’t. A noodle shop serving the local neighbourhood and a dive shop booked by tourists six weeks before they fly out are answering completely different questions, and a lot of the advice online doesn’t separate them.
The real question is this: is your problem that people can’t understand your site, or that the right people never find it? Translation only solves the first one. If your customers search in English, German, Dutch or another language, from outside Thailand, a Thai version doesn’t put you in front of them. It puts you in front of an audience you weren’t trying to reach.
When a Thai version is worth it
- Your customers, or a meaningful share of them, are Thai nationals searching in Thai
- You’re selling something local: everyday goods, local services, anything competing directly with Thai businesses for Thai customers
- You depend on walk-in trade or bookings from people who live in Thailand, not people arriving from abroad
- You’re already getting website visits from Thailand that bounce quickly, which can be a sign people are landing on a page they can’t read comfortably
When it probably isn’t
- Your customers are mostly tourists, expats, or overseas buyers researching before they arrive
- Your business is niche or highly specific, where a rushed or machine-translated Thai page risks looking worse than no Thai page at all
- You have no way to actually handle enquiries in Thai. A Thai page that generates Thai leads you can’t respond to properly can do more harm than good
If none of the “worth it” points apply to you, don’t translate. Spend the time and budget on something that actually reaches your customers instead.
If you do need one, don’t translate everything at once
A stale, half translated site is worse than an honest English only one. Don’t build a full bilingual site on day one. Build this instead:
- Start with the pages that carry the most weight: homepage, main service or product pages, contact and booking
- Use separate URLs for each language, commonly
/th/for Thai, rather than simply swapping the displayed text on the same page - Use hreflang tags so Google knows which version to show to which searcher, rather than guessing
- Keep both versions maintained. A Thai version nobody updates becomes a liability, not an asset
The part almost nobody mentions
None of this only matters for Google any more. People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI to recommend a business, and those tools get asked in Thai as often as in English. Even if you never build a Thai page, it’s worth knowing that your business can be discussed, and recommended, in a language your website doesn’t speak. That’s a separate problem from whether your website itself needs translating, and it’s one a Thai language site alone doesn’t fix.
Common questions
My website gets some visits from Thailand already. Does that mean I need a Thai version? Check what those visitors are doing, not just that they’re arriving. If they’re converting, they may already be comfortable in English. If they’re bouncing quickly, that’s a stronger signal worth acting on.
Can I just use an automatic translation plugin instead of proper Thai pages? It’s better than nothing for basic understanding, but it won’t help you rank for Thai search terms, and it often reads awkwardly to a native speaker, which can undermine trust rather than build it.
What if I only want a Thai presence for one part of my business? That’s reasonable and often the right call. Translating your highest intent pages, the ones people actually book or buy from, is usually worth more than translating your entire site.
This is one part of a bigger picture. Our Visibility Report checks your site’s technical SEO and its AEO readiness together, so you know what’s actually holding it back before you spend money fixing the wrong thing.