Your language switcher sends visitors back to the home page

A visitor switching language should stay on exactly the page they were reading. On most Quebec bilingual sites they are sent back to the home page and have to redo their whole path. Many do not.

The cause is technical and mundane. When a page has no equivalent in the other language, the system does not know where to send the person, and the fallback behaviour is the home page. Since translation is rarely complete, that fallback becomes the normal case.

The effect is strongest where it hurts most. A product page, a specification page, a branch page: those are precisely the pages that often exist in one language only, and they are the ones where the visitor had an intent.

This detail combines badly with the rest. Someone arriving from an English search on a French page, who clicks to switch language and lands on the home page, has lost twice. They leave without seeing what they came for, and you conclude the English market is not responding.

The scale shows in your data. Pages where a language switch is immediately followed by an exit carry the trace of the broken path, and they are almost always the same deep pages.

The rule and its two exceptions

The rule: the switcher leads to the translation of the current page. Nothing else is acceptable when the equivalent exists.

First exception, the page has no equivalent. The right behaviour is not the home page but the closest page in the hierarchy, the category or section containing the current page, with a note saying that this particular page is not translated.

That note matters. A visitor told a specific page does not exist in their language accepts the detour. A visitor sent away without explanation concludes the site is broken.

Second exception, automatic redirection based on browser language. It causes more damage than it solves, notably on corporate machines set to English whose users work in French. Offer, do not decide for them.