Québec’s Bill 96 has reshaped the digital expectations for businesses operating in the province. French is no longer just a courtesy. It’s the legal default, and it touches everything from landing pages and navigation to checkout flows and customer communications. For WordPress sites in particular, compliance isn’t just about what’s visible on screen. It’s about how that content is structured, delivered, and maintained.
A thoughtful audit focuses less on surface checks and more on the underlying architecture. It’s about understanding where compliance breaks down and why it often does without anyone noticing.
What does Bill 96 mean for your website?
From menus to metadata, compliance goes deeper than translation.
Listen to to find out what’s required — and what’s at risk.
French Has to Be More Than Available. It Has to Be Equal.
One of the most common missteps is assuming that offering a French version somewhere on the site satisfies the requirement. It doesn’t. Bill 96 insists on full equivalency between language experiences. That includes visibility, navigation, functionality, and timing.
If a French-speaking visitor faces even a slight delay, reduced functionality, or a less polished experience compared to the English version, that’s a risk. True parity means identical journeys from the first click to the final confirmation.
Interface Layers Often Mask Deeper Issues
Even when content is fully translated, user interface elements can reveal weak points. It’s not uncommon to find a bilingual homepage that slips back into English during a purchase flow or shows untranslated buttons and error messages on mobile.
In WordPress, these inconsistencies often stem from plugin limitations or overlooked defaults. Many themes aren’t fully localized, and some plugins aren’t translation-ready out of the box. Without tight integration between design, development, and content workflows, these cracks form quickly.
Audits need to follow user flows in French, not just review static pages. What language appears when something goes wrong? What do users see when a product is out of stock, or a search returns no results?
Legal Copy, Contracts, and Trademarks Get Overlooked Fast
It’s easy to focus on visible content and miss the moments where legal obligations come into play. That includes terms of service, privacy policies, cookie notices, and purchase agreements. Under Bill 96, these must be presented in French first. Not as a link buried in the footer, but as the default experience.
Trademarks raise their own set of questions. An English brand name might be allowed, but any descriptive text needs a French version. If a registered French trademark exists, it must be used in Québec.
Audits that don’t include these elements leave sites exposed. The surface might seem compliant, while deeper layers remain out of alignment.
Machine Translation Isn’t a Long-Term Strategy
Auto-translated websites can’t guarantee compliance. Tools like Google Translate or instant plugin-based solutions offer speed but not nuance. Grammar, tone, and context are often wrong. And that sends a message—one that regulators and users alike pick up on.
The issue isn’t just linguistic. It’s structural. Many automated solutions don’t touch alt text, form messages, or dynamically generated content. They translate what they can reach and skip the rest. An audit must account for all content types and outputs, not just what’s manually written.
Architecture and Workflow Are Often the Real Problem
WordPress offers a flexible foundation, but flexibility without consistency leads to fragmentation. Sites built without a bilingual-first mindset often struggle to maintain parity. A lack of systemized workflows can mean the French version trails behind or is never published at all.
Audits reveal this quickly. Pages without translations. Products without French descriptions. Meta tags and Open Graph fields left in English. These are structural issues, not content oversights.
The more complex the site, especially for multisite environments, e-commerce platforms, or content-heavy sites, the more essential it becomes to approach compliance from the foundation up.
Building Multilingual WordPress Sites?
Know these key challenges.
Third-Party Integrations Are Quiet Compliance Risks
Calendar embeds, donation platforms, chatbots, and search tools—many of these are powered by external services. Even if the primary site is bilingual, these tools often default to English or offer limited support for French.
That’s a compliance gap, especially when those services handle key customer interactions. A booking system that displays “Submit” instead of “Soumettre” is more than an annoyance. It signals a lack of alignment with Bill 96’s core requirement: that users in Québec are served in French.
A complete audit doesn’t just test what’s controlled internally. It traces every service, form, and widget that delivers content or collects data.
Some Sectors Face Even Greater Scrutiny
E-commerce platforms, government sites, and media organizations all face specific pressures. The expectations around checkout experiences, public access, or editorial timelines raise the bar significantly.
For e-commerce, this means ensuring that every stage of the customer journey, such as product filtering, shipping calculations, error messaging, and invoice generation, is functional and polished in French. For the public sector, French must be the dominant language, not optional. For media, timely translation of new articles and updates is critical to avoid a perception of second-class service.
Auditing these sites requires attention to detail and an understanding of sector-specific standards that extend beyond the fundamental law.
The Goal Isn’t Just Passing the Audit. It’s Sustaining Compliance.
Bill 96 isn’t something to patch once and forget. Sites evolve. New content gets added. Plugins get updated. Legal text changes. If compliance isn’t built into the workflow, even the best-built sites will drift out of alignment over time.
Sustainable compliance means more than identifying what’s broken. It means having a system that keeps it from breaking again. That’s where CMS configuration, editorial governance, and proper translation workflows matter just as much as the initial audit findings.
Trew Knowledge helps organizations build WordPress platforms that are compliant by design. From multilingual architecture to ongoing governance strategies, we create digital ecosystems that support bilingual content without compromise and stay aligned with Québec’s evolving requirements. Contact us today.
