Here's a gap most small business sites are leaving on the table: roughly 1.18 billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, yet Chinese-language content makes up only about 1.1% of the web. English, spoken by fewer people worldwide, dominates a much larger share of online content. That mismatch between population and web presence is, in plain terms, an underserved market.
You don't need to translate your whole site into ten languages to take advantage of this. Adding one well-done second language — usually Simplified Chinese, if your customers or market touch China, Singapore, Malaysia, or the Chinese-speaking diaspora — is often enough to stand out, because so few small business sites bother.
Why most sites skip it
Two reasons: cost and complexity. Translation plugins solve the problem but add an ongoing bill, and doing it "properly" in code sounds like it requires rebuilding your whole site. Neither has to be true.
What plugins actually cost
If you're on WordPress, the two default answers are WPML and Weglot, and their pricing models work very differently.
WPML uses flat annual pricing: $39/year for a basic multilingual blog, $99/year for the CMS tier most small businesses actually need (translation management, visual editor), and $199/year for agencies managing multiple client sites.
Weglot charges monthly based on word count and traffic, starting around $15/month but climbing to $49–$79/month once you cross its content or pageview limits. Over three years, that usage-based pricing can end up costing three to six times more than WPML's flat annual model for a growing site.
Either way, you're paying every year, indefinitely, for as long as the site exists — and that's before you pay a human translator to fix the parts machine translation gets wrong (which, for anything customer-facing, you should).
The plugin-free alternative
If your site is a marketing page, a portfolio, or a small business site — not a large content-heavy blog with dozens of new articles a month — there's a simpler way: build the site with your text content separated into a single structured file (a JSON or config file), with one version per language, and let the framework pick the right version based on the visitor's language.
This works especially well with a static Next.js site. There's no database, no plugin, no per-word billing — just two versions of the same file, edited directly. A developer (or you, following a template) maintains it like any other text file. For a site with a fixed set of pages that doesn't change daily, this is faster to set up and cheaper to run than any plugin subscription, forever.
The tradeoff is honest: if you have a content team publishing new articles constantly and no one on staff who's comfortable editing a config file, a CMS-based plugin is still the better fit — you're trading a recurring bill for editorial convenience, and that's a fair trade for the right business.
What this actually looks like
Both of the templates I sell were built with exactly this approach, mostly because I wanted to prove to myself it works before selling it to anyone else.
SaaS Starter ($19) is a Next.js 15 + Tailwind marketing site for SaaS products, shipped with English and Simplified Chinese out of the box. Realty Starter ($24) does the same for real estate agent sites — which matters more than it might sound, given that Chinese buyers have led all foreign buyers of U.S. residential real estate for over a decade. In both cases, switching languages is a static site with no server round-trip and no plugin tax, and every string of text lives in one file per language, so adding or correcting a translation is a normal edit, not a dashboard operation.
If you want to see it working rather than take my word for it, the demo links above switch language live, and checkout for either one is a single Stripe link: SaaS Starter checkout, Realty Starter checkout.
Who this isn't for
To be direct: if you need more than two languages, or your content changes daily and needs to be editable by non-technical staff through a visual interface, a plugin-based CMS is the more sensible tool, even with the recurring cost. The config-file approach is built for a fixed set of pages in one or two languages, edited occasionally — not a newsroom.
The takeaway
The population-to-content gap for Chinese online is real and measurable — over a billion speakers, about 1% of web content. If any part of your customer base speaks it, adding one well-made second language is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-cost things you can do to a small business site, and it doesn't require a monthly plugin bill to get there.
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