Montreal web design company: how to choose one in Quebec
Choose the type of Montreal web design company before you choose the firm: freelancer, boutique studio, agency, offshore team or platform reseller. Each fails in a predictable way, and Quebec adds two duties, French and Law 25, that a portfolio will not show. This guide gives the checks, questions and contract terms that do.
Hiring a web design company is usually framed as a portfolio problem: look at the work, call two references. That holds up until the province’s language regulator opens a file on you.
What the language regulator’s complaint data shows
The Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) publishes what it receives. In 2024–2025 it logged 10,371 complaints about the Charter of the French Language. Montreal accounted for 53% of them. By subject (OQLF statistics 2024–2025):
| Subject of the complaint | Share of complaints |
|---|---|
| Language of service | 40% |
| Commercial documentation | 24% |
| Public and commercial signage | 18% |
| Language of products | 7% |
| Language of work | 6% |
| Other | 5% |
Websites and social media alone account for 19% of all complaints, roughly 2,000 files. Your website is not a peripheral compliance surface: it draws nearly one complaint in five.
The outcomes are milder than the headlines suggest. Of the 8,956 files the OQLF closed that year, 36% ended because the situation was corrected, 25% with an incentive intervention and 10% with a warning; 22% were found unfounded or inadmissible, and none of the outcomes the page lists is a fine. The realistic downside of hiring a firm that does not understand the Charter is paying twice: once for the site, once to fix it.
The pool is also growing. Since June 1, 2025, businesses with 25 to 49 employees must register with the OQLF. The Office issued 3,362 registration attestations in 2024–2025, up 60%, and registered businesses rose from 11,509 to 14,366, with firms of 25 to 49 employees making up 65% of the new attestations (OQLF annual report release). Many Montreal businesses have entered a regime their existing website was never built for.
The five kinds of Montreal web design company
Almost every provider in this market is one of five things. They are not quality tiers, since there are excellent freelancers and mediocre agencies, but they carry different risks.
| Type | Typical engagement | Strongest at | Fails at |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo freelancer | One person, one site | Speed, price, direct communication | Continuity; one person is the whole team |
| Boutique studio | A small team, design-led | Craft, brand work, bilingual nuance | Complex integrations; ongoing operations |
| Full-service agency | A larger team, several disciplines | Scale, repeatable compliance process, retainers | Cost; junior staff on small accounts |
| Offshore or remote team | Contracted abroad | Hourly cost | Quebec-specific duties, time zones, French |
| Platform reseller | A template on a subscription | A predictable monthly cost | Ownership; limits on customization |
A freelancer is often the best value for a straightforward brochure site. The risk is continuity: plugins update, browsers change, the Charter changed in 2025 and will change again. Ask one question: what happens to this site if you take a full-time job next year? A good answer involves documentation, a standard platform and a named colleague. A bad answer is reassurance.
A boutique studio is where much of Montreal’s genuinely bilingual work lives. Studios are usually project shops, excellent at building and less interested in running. If your site has a catalogue, a booking system or a payment flow, check whether the studio sells a maintenance plan or only tolerates one.
A full-service agency has process, and process is what makes compliance repeatable. If you are crossing the 25-employee registration threshold, an agency is often the right choice, because it will have supported a francization file before. The trade-off: a small project inside a large agency is staffed by whoever is free, so ask who will do the work, not who is in the pitch meeting.
An offshore or remote team costs less per hour, and for a build against a finished specification that can work. For a Montreal business it usually does not, for an unglamorous reason: the Quebec duties are not in the specification unless someone who knows them wrote it. A remote team builds what you asked for. If you did not ask for French parity, you will learn about it from a regulator, not from your developer.
A platform reseller is honest and right for many small businesses. Ask two questions before signing: do I own the design and content if I leave, and can this template show a complete French version at the same quality as the English? Many templates technically can and in practice will not, because the workflow assumes one language.
A quote is only comparable to another quote from the same category. A $6,000 freelance quote and a $40,000 agency quote are not competing offers; they answer different questions. What web design costs in Quebec covers the rates, minimum project sizes and what drives them.
Montreal is bilingual at work, not French-only
None of this means English disappears. In the 2021 Census, 80% of workers in the Montreal metropolitan area were at least bilingual, and 69% were English–French bilingual. Asked which language they used most at work, 70% said French, 21% English and 8% both equally (Statistics Canada).
A site that treats French as the legal minimum and English as the real product reads wrong to most of the market. A site that treats English as an afterthought loses the fifth of workers who use it most. Both languages need to be written, not translated, so ask any firm who writes the French, and whether it is a line item or an assumption.
The two duties that should drive your choice
Two Quebec laws attach obligations to the website a Montreal web design company builds for you. They are why the question of the firm’s type matters more here than in Toronto.
The Charter of the French Language gives consumers the right to be informed and served in French. For catalogues, brochures and similar publications, the Charter allows another language only when a French version of comparable quality is available on at-least-equal terms. A French version that is machine-translated, or three pages shorter than the English, does not meet that bar. Two further points follow in practice:
- The French has to be easy to reach. A language toggle buried in a footer, or a site that redirects by location and offers no way back, is a design choice with a compliance consequence.
- Parity has to survive every edit. That argues for a CMS in which both versions of a page are linked and edited together. Each version also needs its own stable address, which makes it a search architecture decision as much as a content one.
Law 25 is the private-sector privacy law. It governs what your site does with personal information: your contact form, your analytics, your consent banner and the services you send data to. The Commission d’accès à l’information states that businesses can face administrative penalties of up to 2% of worldwide turnover or $10 million, and penal fines starting at $15,000. The obligations are met during the build, not after launch.
Every agency says it is Law 25 compliant, so ask a question that is harder to answer in general terms: list every third-party service this site will send personal information to, and where each one processes it. A firm that has done the work produces the list. A firm that has not says it depends on the stack, which is true and is also why it should have been scoped.
Neither duty is expensive to meet while building, and both are costly to retrofit. That asymmetry is the argument for filtering on firm type: you are choosing how likely it is that these appear in the scope of work without you raising them.
Three checks you can run before the first call
You can run these on the live sites a firm features in its own portfolio, in about fifteen minutes, with no technical background.
- The language-parity test. Find the language toggle and switch. Do you land on the same page in the other language, or on the home page? Is the French version complete, or is the pricing table missing? Does the address change in a stable way, such as
/fr/, or does the content change behind the same address? A toggle that resets you to the home page is a common defect, and it quietly hurts search visibility, because a search engine cannot index a page with no address of its own. - The consent-banner test. Open a portfolio site in a private window. A banner should appear before any non-essential tracking starts, with a reject option as visible as accept and a way to choose purposes. A banner with only an Accept button and a link to a policy suggests the firm has not thought about consent.
- The phone test. Open the site on your own phone, on mobile data, and try to complete the action the site exists for. A portfolio piece that fails this was signed off by someone who did not check.
What the engagement looks like
Wireframes come before visual design. If a firm shows you colours in week one, ask what the pages are supposed to do. The order of the work is where compliance is either designed in or forgotten:
- Discovery and content inventory. Which pages exist, what they say, and in which languages. If the French content plan is not settled here, it will be improvised later.
- Information architecture. The address structure, including how the two language versions point to each other.
- Wireframes, then visual design.
- Build. This includes the consent layer and analytics configuration, which are engineering work and not a plugin switched on at the end.
- Content load and translation review, by someone who writes French professionally.
- Testing, launch and handover. Handover means credentials, documentation and source code.
A firm that cannot describe its process in roughly these terms is not necessarily bad, but it is improvising, and improvisation is where the French version becomes a phase-two item that never arrives. Noordev’s own process is set out on its web design and development page.
Contract terms that decide who carries the risk
When a regulator opens a file, the order lands on your business, not on the firm that wrote the code. A few contract lines are worth more than a portfolio review:
- French parity as a deliverable, priced separately. Not “bilingual site” as a bullet, but a line with a price, so that cutting it is a visible decision.
- Consent and privacy configuration as scope. Whoever builds the analytics builds the consent layer. Name them.
- Source code and design file ownership on final payment. Ask what transfers. On platform subscriptions the honest answer is often “less than you think”, which is fine if you know it going in.
- A named maintenance path. Who applies updates, how often and for what fee, or a written statement that nobody does. See website maintenance for what an ongoing plan covers.
- A defect window. A period after launch, typically a few weeks to a few months, in which fixes are not billed.
Questions and red flags
Ask these on the first call. The answers are diagnostic even when they are short.
- Which of your live clients sell to Quebec consumers, and how did you handle the French requirement for them? Listen for a specific client and approach, not reassurance.
- Show me a French page and its English equivalent from a site you built. Are they of comparable quality?
- Who writes and reviews the French: a staff member, a professional translator or software?
- How does the CMS keep the French and English versions of a page in sync when we edit?
- Who will do the work, and what else are they working on?
And these are reasons to be cautious:
- “We’ll add the French version after launch.” Parity is a build requirement; retrofitting it usually means rebuilding the routing.
- “Google Translate handles the French.” Machine output is not a French version of comparable quality, and Quebec readers spot it at once.
- A single “Accept cookies” button with no reject option.
- A quote with one line and one number. You cannot compare it with anything, and neither can they.
If three of the five questions get a version of “we’ll figure that out in discovery”, you are paying to be their first Quebec project.
Frequently asked questions
Does a Montreal web design company need to be located in Montreal?
Not necessarily, but someone on the engagement needs working fluency in Quebec’s obligations and in French. Location is a decent proxy for that, not the thing itself. A Montreal address with no French capability is worth less than a remote team that has shipped Quebec sites before.
Is a bilingual site required if all my customers speak English?
The Charter’s obligations attach to doing business in Quebec, not to your customer mix, and complaints come from the public, not from an audit of your client list.
If you are weighing quotes and want a second opinion on which category you are shopping in, talk to us. We will tell you plainly whether what you need is a build, a template or a smaller fix.