Should your practice's website be in Spanish too?

TL;DR — If your patients come from the neighborhood around your office, then probably yes, though the answer varies more across the San Gabriel Valley than most people expect. The deciding question is not whether a Spanish page would be pleasant to have, but what share of the people living near you speak Spanish at home — and whether the forms they have to fill in when they arrive exist in that language, which is the harder half and the one that actually changes anything.

It depends on your patients, and that is the real answer rather than an evasion. Any agency telling you that every practice needs a Spanish site, or that none does, is selling you something instead of looking at your numbers.

The number that matters, and the one that misleads

The statistic that circulates in this conversation is the Hispanic share of a city’s population, and although it is the one most often quoted, it measures something other than the thing you need. Ethnicity and language are not the same variable: a third-generation family may speak only English at home, while a household that speaks Spanish daily may identify itself in any number of ways. What determines whether a translated page earns its cost is how many people near your office speak Spanish at home, and the Census measures precisely that, separately, in table C16001.

Across the ten cities we work in, that figure varies by roughly a factor of ten:

City	Speak Spanish at home
Monrovia	30.1%
Pasadena	24.2%
Alhambra	23.0%
Monterey Park	16.4%
San Gabriel	15.1%
San Marino	3.2%

U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 five-year estimates, table C16001, residents aged five and over.

Nearly one resident in three in Monrovia against roughly one in thirty in San Marino, from practices that sit some eleven miles apart and consequently face entirely different questions — which is the reason a regional average is useless to either of them. The San Gabriel Valley is not a single market, and a figure describing the whole of it accurately describes none of its constituent cities.

Note also that a high Spanish share and a high Chinese share are not alternatives. Alhambra runs 23.0% Spanish and 33.0% Chinese at once, which puts three languages on every shift at the front desk and is a different article.

The cheap half and the expensive half

Here is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that decides whether any of this was worth doing.

A translated website is the cheap half, because it costs money once, requires almost nothing afterwards, and does genuinely help a prospective patient decide to telephone you. That value is real enough, but it is not where the difficulty lives.

The expensive half is everything that happens once they have called: the new-patient paperwork, the consent form, the after-visit instructions explaining how a medication is taken and when to return, and the appointment reminder that arrives a week later. Where those remain in English while the website is in Spanish, the practice has advertised a service it does not actually provide, and the patient discovers the discrepancy at the least convenient moment available — in the waiting room, holding a clipboard, asking a daughter to translate a medical history aloud.

The honest order, therefore, is the reverse of the intuitive one: if only one of the two is affordable this year, translate the forms. A practice with English pages and Spanish intake paperwork serves its patients considerably better than one arranged the other way round, and putting those forms onto patients’ own telephones before they arrive removes the translation from the waiting room altogether — a smaller undertaking than most practices assume before they price it.

Do the website properly, or leave it

If you do build the Spanish site, it has to be real pages rather than a translation widget bolted to the English ones.

A widget substitutes words without understanding what was being searched for, and a Spanish speaker looking for you is not typing “dentist” rendered mechanically into Spanish but “dentista cerca de mí” or “consultorio dental que acepta Medi-Cal” — separate phrases carrying separate search volume and separate competition. Google indexes those as separate pages targeting separate terms, while a JavaScript overlay is not indexed as a page at all. It is invisible to search, which was the entire problem you were trying to solve.

What works is an /es/ version with its own URLs, written the way a Spanish speaker would actually search and read rather than machine-translated from your English sentence by sentence. Your service pages get their own Spanish slugs, and the pages declare the relationship between the two versions correctly — hreflang, if you want the term — so Google serves each visitor the right language instead of guessing, or worse, showing your Spanish-speaking patients the English page because it happens to rank better.

That is considerably more work than installing a plugin, and it is simultaneously the only version of the arrangement that appears at all when somebody actually searches in Spanish.

If you are not sure

Check three things before spending anything. How many of your current patients already deal with your front desk in Spanish, and during which hours somebody can actually handle that call. Whether the practices on the same street have Spanish pages and are taking calls you never hear about. And whether what you provide is the sort of care where understanding the instructions in your own language changes the outcome rather than merely the experience — which, for most of medicine and dentistry, it does.

Where two of those three point to yes, build it properly. Where none does, keep the budget for something that will move further, and start with the forms anyway.