About 1 in 7 people in Sacramento County speaks Spanish at home. If any of them are your customers, a contractor website in Spanish (or at least one that says you speak it) is the difference between a call and a scroll past.
We checked the 18 Sacramento-region contractors from our audit of licensed contractors for any sign of Spanish. One site says "Se habla español", in one line on its homepage. None has a page in Spanish, a language switcher or a translation tool. All 18 tell browsers they are written in English.
We build websites for trade contractors, so weigh this accordingly. The check was done on 2026-11-01, the method is at the end, and the only firm named is named for something done well.
Contractor website in Spanish: what 18 sites offer
Says Spanish is spoken
A page in Spanish
A language switcher (English / Español)
A translation widget
Pages marked as English
| What a Spanish speaker finds, on 2026-11-01 | Sites |
|---|---|
| Says Spanish is spoken | 1 |
| A page in Spanish | 0 |
| A language switcher (English / Español) | 0 |
| A translation widget | 0 |
| Pages marked as English | 18 |
The one mention is easy to miss. It sits at the end of a paragraph about calling, about two and a half screens down a desktop homepage, and it does not appear on the other nine pages we read, including the FAQ and the service pages.
Who you might be missing
The Census Bureau released its newest one-year figures from the American Community Survey on October 29, 2026. For 2025, table S1601 counts people aged 5 and over:
Sacramento County
Sacramento metro (with Placer, El Dorado, Yolo)
Yolo County
Placer County
El Dorado County
| Area | Speak Spanish at home | Share | Of those, speak English less than "very well" |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sacramento County | 216,659 | 14.2% | 76,156 (35.2%) |
| Sacramento metro (with Placer, El Dorado, Yolo) | 290,827 | 12.4% | 101,580 (34.9%) |
| Yolo County | 43,094 | 20.0% | 16,745 (38.9%) |
| Placer County | 20,308 | 4.8% | 4,787 (23.6%) |
| El Dorado County | 10,766 | 5.8% | 3,892 (36.2%) |
These are survey estimates with margins of error; Sacramento County's Spanish-speaking count is give or take about 10,000. The direction is not in doubt.
Two honest readings of that table:
- Most Spanish speakers here also speak English very well. About two in three do. An English site already reaches them.
- About 1 in 20 Sacramento County residents speaks Spanish and has some difficulty with English. That is roughly 76,000 people in one county. Nearly 10,000 Spanish-speaking households in Sacramento County are what the Census Bureau calls "limited English speaking": no one in the house aged 14 or over speaks English "very well" (2025 table S1602). For those homes, a contractor who answers in Spanish is not a nice extra. It is the one they can talk to most easily.
The census counts people, not jobs, so nobody can tell you from this how many of them need a roofer this year. What it does tell you is that in Yolo County one resident in five speaks Spanish at home, and not one site in this sample says a word to them in it.
What good looks like
A1 Plumbing and Drains, the only site in the sample that mentions Spanish, ends its call-us paragraph with it: "Call (916) 347-3275 or message us online to work with a highly trusted plumber in Sacramento. Se habla español." That is the right sentence in the right place, next to the phone number. The only thing missing is that it appears once. A customer who lands on a service page never sees it.
How to add Spanish without overpromising
You do not need a whole second website on day one. Build it in steps, and only promise what your crew can deliver.
- Say it where the phone number is. If someone in your office or on your crew speaks Spanish, put "Se habla español" next to the number in the header, on the contact page and on every service page. Naming who to ask for beats a general promise.
- Make one real Spanish page. Start with your contact page or your most-booked service, written or checked by a person who speaks Spanish. Give it its own address, such as
/es/contacto. Google recommends "different URLs for each language version of a page rather than using cookies or browser settings." - Link the two versions both ways. A visible "Español" link on the English page, "English" on the Spanish one, plus hreflang tags in the code. Google's rule is that "each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions."
- Never switch languages for the visitor. Google's advice is to "avoid automatically redirecting users from one language version of a site to a different language version of a site." Let the customer choose.
- Translate the form, not just the words around it. Spanish labels on the quote form, and a box that says "I prefer Spanish" so the right person calls back. Then make sure the right person does call back.
- Skip the translate button. Google itself limited its free website translation widget to non-commercial sites in 2020 and warned its translations "may not be perfect". Every phone browser can already translate a page. A widget adds nothing that tells the customer a person will understand them.
A note on contracts
California's translation law, Civil Code 1632, requires a business that "negotiates primarily in Spanish" to hand over a translation before signing certain contracts, such as installment sales and consumer loans. The same section says the term "does not include a home improvement contract", so your job contract itself is usually outside it. Financing paperwork negotiated in Spanish can still be covered. If you plan to sell financed jobs in Spanish, ask your lawyer which documents need a Spanish copy. This is not legal advice.
What to do this week
- Ask your team who speaks Spanish well enough to take a call and walk a job.
- If anyone does, add one line next to your phone number on every page: "Se habla español".
- Pick one page to translate properly, and have a Spanish speaker you trust read it before it goes live.
- Check your Google profile and your service area page for the same promise, so the customer meets it before they reach your site.
The other checks on this same set of sites are how a customer asks for a quote, whether they can call you in one tap, and whether your site states a warranty.
Our own site
We checked flarebuilt.com the same way. Every page is marked as English and there is no Spanish page. Our Elk Grove page says we can build pages in a second language, with you or a translator you trust supplying or approving the words. We offer it to clients and do not do it ourselves yet, so by this post's own checklist we fail step 1: we have not said whether anyone here can help you in Spanish.
What we would build for a contractor
A site that says "Se habla español" next to the phone number on every page, Spanish versions of your contact page and best-selling services with their own addresses and proper links between the languages, and a quote form that tells you which language the customer wants. What a site like that costs is in our contractor website cost guide. Get in touch and tell us which jobs you want more of in Spanish.
How we did this, so you can check it
- The contractors. The same 18 websites as our quote request check, drawn from the 42 licensed contractors in the original audit. Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, solar, low voltage and general building, in Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties. Several do mostly commercial work.
- The look. On 2026-11-01, up to 10 pages per site from its sitemap, in a desktop Chrome browser, searched (including hidden text and embedded widgets) for "español", "se habla", "hablamos", "bilingual", "Spanish" and "translate". Every match was opened and read; "Spanish tiles" on a roofing menu and translation settings inside website plugins were set aside. We read each homepage's code for a page language, hreflang tags and translation plugins. Four one- and two-page sites and one site that only loads its pages when clicked were checked by hand in the browser.
- The outside sources. Census Bureau tables S1601 and S1602, 2025 American Community Survey 1-year estimates (released October 29, 2026), and its 2025 Subject Definitions; California Civil Code 1632 as amended effective January 1, 2025; Google Search Central's pages on multilingual sites (updated December 10, 2025) and localized versions (updated September 21, 2026), and its May 19, 2020 post on the Website Translator. All read on 2026-11-01.
- Limits. Eighteen sites in one region, on one day. A contractor with no Spanish on its site may have a crew that speaks it, and say so on the phone. This measures only what a Spanish-speaking customer can find before they call.