Bill 96 and your website: a practical checklist for Quebec businesses

What Bill 96 actually asks of a website

Bill 96, An Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec, received assent on June 1, 2022. It amended the Charter of the French Language, which already covered commercial publications. The short version for websites: if you do business in Quebec, the commercial information on your site must be available in French, and French must be at least as available as any other language.

"At least as available" is the part people skip. A full English site with a French homepage and three translated service pages does not meet it. Neither does a French version that exists but is missing the prices, the product details or the booking form.

Some measures came in later; the rules on trademarks and signage, for instance, took effect June 1, 2025.

What the law does not require: a French-only website. English, Spanish or anything else can sit alongside. The French just has to be complete, and not second-class.

French-first beats translation-last

Most of the non-compliant sites we review were built the same way. English copy written, design approved, site nearly done, then someone remembers Quebec. The French gets pasted in a week before launch, often straight out of a machine translation tool, and nobody checks whether it fits the layout.

The result is predictable. French usually runs longer than English, so buttons overflow and headlines get cut off. Idioms come out as nonsense. And the French version reads like what it is: an afterthought, which is exactly what the law is trying to prevent.

For Montreal clients, we write French first, then adapt to English. Not because English matters less, but because a design built around the longer language does not break later.

The language switcher and the default

• A Quebec visitor should land on French by default, or at minimum on a page where French is plainly offered. A tiny "FR" link buried in the footer is not "equally available".
• The switcher should take people to the same page in the other language, not back to the homepage. It is also better for search; we cover why in our bilingual SEO guide.
• Label languages in their own language: "Français", "English". Skip the flags. France's flag is not Quebec's, and the Union Jack represents nobody here.
• If a page is not worth translating, it may not be worth publishing.

The parts everyone forgets

The homepage gets translated. The plumbing often does not. These are the places we check first:

• Forms: labels, placeholder text, dropdown options, validation messages ("This field is required") and the success message.
• Automatic emails: contact confirmations, order confirmations, password resets, shipping notices. WooCommerce and most form plugins send English until someone configures them otherwise.
• PDFs and downloads: price lists, menus, brochures, spec sheets. If the English PDF exists, the French one should too.
• Cart and checkout: shipping options, tax labels, payment errors. Payment gateways often have their own language settings. Check them.
• Error pages and system messages: the 404 page, "no results found", out-of-stock notices.
• Images with text: banners, infographics, promotional graphics. Text baked into an image needs a French version of the image. Better: put the text in HTML over the image, so it can be translated and read by screen readers.
• Alt text, page titles and meta descriptions: rarely seen by visitors, always read by search engines.

Practical tip: set your browser to French, clear your cookies, and go through your site as a customer would, all the way to the confirmation email. Every English word you meet goes on the to-do list.

Contracts, terms and the cookie banner

Bill 96 tightened the rules on contracts of adhesion, the standard non-negotiable kind, which includes the terms and conditions most online stores use. The general rule is that the French version must be provided first; the parties can then agree to use another language, but only after the French version was made available. In practice, your terms of sale, terms of use and return policy need French versions that are complete and current.

Invoices, receipts and order confirmations are commercial documents and belong in French too. Same for quotes. When we send a Montreal client a written fixed-price quote, the French version is the reference.

The cookie banner deserves its own line. It is often a third-party script that ships in English, and nobody notices. If a Quebec visitor's first interaction with your site is an English consent popup, that is a poor start for Bill 96 and for Law 25. We cover the consent side in Law 25 and cookies.

Mistakes we see most often

1. Machine translation published without review. Fine as a draft, not as a final version.
2. France French where Quebec French is expected: "devis" instead of "soumission", "mail" instead of "courriel", "shopping" instead of "magasinage". Not illegal, but it tells readers nobody local looked at it.
3. A French site that lags behind. New posts, promotions and products go up in English, and "the French will follow". It often does not.
4. Social media embeds, review widgets and chatbots that only speak English.
5. Assuming a head office outside Quebec exempts a site aimed at Quebec customers. Check before you rely on that.

Your Bill 96 website checklist

1. Every public page exists in French, with the same content as the other language versions.
2. French is the default, or at least as prominent as any other language.
3. The language switcher links to the equivalent page and reads "Français" / "English".
4. Form labels, placeholders, validation and success messages are in French.
5. Automatic emails (contact, orders, accounts) go out in French to French-speaking users.
6. Every downloadable PDF has a French version.
7. Cart, checkout and payment messages are in French.
8. The 404 page, search results and stock notices are in French.
9. Images containing text have French versions, or the text is in HTML.
10. Terms of sale, terms of use, return policy and privacy policy are available in French first.
11. The cookie banner and any chat or review widgets display in French.
12. Someone fluent in Quebec French has reviewed the final copy, and there is a process to keep the French current.

This article is general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, check the OQLF's guidance for businesses or talk to a lawyer.

If you would rather not go through this list yourself, our Bill 96 and Law 25 audit, at a fixed price, gives you a written list of what to fix. If the fixes add up to a rebuild, we quote the new site at a fixed price; we explain what moves that price in what a website costs in Montreal. Either way, you can get a fixed-price quote before committing to anything.