Simplified or traditional Chinese for your website?

Most guides stop at a map: Simplified here, Traditional there. That part is easy. The harder part is what your choice does to your search engine, your budget and the way you build the site.

This guide is part of our work on translating and localizing a website for China.

Which script fits which market?

Your buyer’s location decides. Simplified is used primarily in mainland China and Singapore, and Traditional in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.⁵ Location also decides your search engine, so one choice settles both. Note that Singapore shares the mainland’s script but not its engine.

Audience	Script	Main engine, October 2026	Baidu share	Watch for
Mainland China	Simplified	Baidu 49.00%, Bing 21.69% 1	49.00%	The national standard 6
Taiwan	Traditional	Google 80.02% 2	Not among the 6 listed	Taiwan vocabulary
Hong Kong	Traditional	Google 89.59% 3	0.43%	Hong Kong wording
Macau	Traditional 5	Google 87.67% 25	0.99%	See Hong Kong
Singapore	Simplified 5	Google 92.35% 4	0.19%	Local vocabulary 8
Malaysia	Mixed	Google 91.59% 32	Not among the 6 listed	Simplified is official, Traditional is common online 7
Chinese speakers abroad	Often listed as Traditional 5, no figures	Depends on the country	Depends	See the last section

Hong Kong Translators and EC Innovations list Malaysia as Simplified, full stop.²¹²² Wikipedia’s account is less tidy, and it’s a thin source, so ask a local reader before you commit.

These shares are a one-month snapshot from one measurer, and they move, so check the current month before you quote them.¹

For the full picture, see search engine market share in China.

What actually differs between the two?

Four layers differ: character forms, vocabulary, punctuation and glyph shape. Only the first is a matter of script. That’s why a Traditional page written for Taiwan can still sound wrong in Hong Kong.

The visible gap is in the strokes: 龙 has 5 and 龍 has 16, 书 has 4 and 書 has 10.¹¹

Layer	Example	Does a basic converter fix it?
Character form	发 becomes 發 or 髮, depending on meaning 9	Not reliably
Vocabulary	Software is 软件 on the mainland, 軟體 in Taiwan 9	No, unless it uses regional word lists
Punctuation	Sits in the corner, next to the preceding text, on the mainland. Centered in Taiwan and Hong Kong 13	Check it, don’t assume
Glyph shape	One code point can look different by region 5	No, it depends on the font

The W3C’s draft on Chinese layout says that for most rules, regional differences outweigh Simplified versus Traditional differences.¹³ It even advises software to separate rules by region, not script.¹³

Here’s what the vocabulary layer looks like. These are the same meanings, not translation choices.

English	Mainland	Taiwan
Software	软件 9	軟體 9
Information	信息 9	資訊 9
Printer	打印机 8	印表機 8
Database	数据库 10	資料庫 10
Video	视频 11	影片 11

Traditional isn’t one standard either. ICS gives software as 軟體 in Taiwan and 軟件 in Hong Kong, and digital as 數位 and 數碼.¹²

Our guide to Chinese for Hong Kong and Taiwan covers those differences.

Why a converter isn’t enough

Because the two scripts don’t map one to one. Several Traditional characters merged into one Simplified character, so a tool has to guess. 发 is 發 in “send” but 髮 in “hair”.⁹

Competing guides mention that example. None we read gives the scale. Halpern and Kerman’s 1999 paper is still the most precise account we found:⁹

• Common characters: 238 of the 2,000 most frequent Simplified characters, about 12%, map to several Traditional forms.
• The reverse direction: only about 20 of the 2,000 most frequent Traditional characters map to several Simplified ones.
• Words: about 21% of common Simplified word units contain such a character, against about 3.5% for Traditional.
• A test passage: plain code conversion got 29 of 105 characters wrong, about 28%.

So direction matters. Simplified to Traditional is the risky way, and going from Traditional to Simplified is safer without being trivial. The paper also warns that conversions aren’t always reversible.⁹

Newer tools do better, and the problem hasn’t gone away. In an ACL 2020 paper, Pranav A and Augenstein tested Simplified to Traditional conversion on Hong Kong and Taiwan literature and news. A sentence only counted if every character was right.³⁴

Converter	Sentences fully correct, 2020 test
Hanziconv	55.6%
Mafan	72.6%
OpenCC	85.3%
2kenize, the authors’ own model	92.4%

1. Hanziconv55.6%
2. Mafan72.6%
3. OpenCC85.3%
4. 2kenize, the authors' own model92.4%

Their sentences averaged about 200 characters, so one wrong character fails a long stretch of text. One OpenCC miss turned 发展 (“develop”) into 髮展, using the “hair” character, inside a sentence about developing countries.³⁴

If you already have one version and want the other, use conversion as a first draft:

1. Pick the regional setting. OpenCC, a widely used open-source converter,³⁴ offers s2tw for Taiwan, s2twp for Taiwan with local phrases, and s2hk for Hong Kong.¹⁰
2. Know the limits. OpenCC lists its Hong Kong phrase setting, s2hkp, as still in development.¹⁰
3. Flag the doubtful spans. The --ambiguities mode of OpenCC’s command-line tool marks output where a dictionary match is one-to-many.¹⁰
4. Protect your names. Lock brand, product and person names before you convert. Halpern and Kerman show that a name like Kennedy can differ entirely by region.⁹
5. Send it to a native reader. Use someone from the target region, and have them check words and punctuation, not just characters.

For the wider job, see how to translate your website into Chinese and whether machine translation is good enough.

Does the script change your Chinese SEO?

Yes, through your audience and your keywords. Beyond that, the evidence runs out.

Keyword lists don’t carry over: someone looking for software in Taiwan types different words from someone on the mainland.⁹

Vendors go further. Elite Asia says Baidu “strongly favours” Simplified, and that Traditional on mainland content will harm your SEO.¹¹ ICS says Baidu favors Simplified results.¹² Neither gives data.

Hong Kong and Taiwan are a different job. Google is the main engine in both, by a wide margin.²³ A plan built around Baidu tools won’t help you there.

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Is Traditional Chinese allowed on a mainland-facing site?

The law doesn’t settle this for a private foreign website, so don’t read it as a ban or as permission. One competing guide calls Simplified “non-negotiable”,¹¹ which goes further than the text we read.

China’s language law was revised on December 27, 2025, and took effect on January 1, 2026.⁶ These are the articles that matter:

Article	What it covers
Art. 2	Putonghua and standard characters are the national standard 6
Art. 14	Public services use standard characters, dominant when beside a foreign language 6
Art. 15	Broadcasting, online shows and games, public facilities, signs and ads, company names, and names, packaging and instructions of goods sold in China 6
Art. 17	Information technology products, plus portals and apps run by governments or providing public services 6
Art. 19	Traditional may be kept for heritage, calligraphy, publishing, teaching and research, or approved cases 6

The text doesn’t name foreign companies’ websites. Whether your site, your claims or your online ads fall under these rules is a question for a local adviser.

The commercial answer is simpler. If you sell to mainland buyers, write in Simplified, whatever the legal scope turns out to be.

How to run both scripts on one site

Give each script its own URL, and keep each page in one script. Hong Kong Translators warns that mixing them creates a disjointed experience, though it offers no data.²¹

Our guide to subfolders, subdomains and separate sites covers the structure.

Illustrative example, with placeholder URLs:

<html lang="zh-Hans">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-Hans" href="https://example.com/zh-hans/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-Hant-TW" href="https://example.com/zh-tw/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-Hant-HK" href="https://example.com/zh-hk/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />

• Use script tags. The W3C describes zh-Hans and zh-Hant as the labels for script, while zh-CN and zh-TW were stand-ins for script.¹⁴
• Add a region only when it helps. The W3C says to keep tags as short as you can, so add one only if you run separate Taiwan and Hong Kong versions.¹⁴
• Link in both directions. Every version lists itself and all the others, and Google ignores the tags if two pages don’t point to each other.¹⁶
• Write the language correctly anyway. Google says it doesn’t use hreflang or lang to detect a page’s language.¹⁶ The text itself has to be right.
• Don’t redirect by guessed language. Google advises against automatic redirects based on a visitor’s assumed language.¹⁷
• Match the font to the region. Browsers can use the language tag to choose a font.¹⁵ Source Han Sans comes in separate Simplified, Taiwan and Hong Kong configurations.²⁰ See our website design guide.

Baidu is the open question. We found no mention of hreflang in the Baidu guide we read, last updated in 2014.¹⁸ Third parties don’t agree on how far that goes. Ahrefs says Baidu ignores the tag,¹⁹ while Chinafy says Baidu doesn’t “fully embrace” it and still puts it on its checklist.³³ Neither cites Baidu.

So treat these tags as serving browsers and Google, and rely on a dedicated Chinese version for Baidu.

What if you don’t know where your buyers are?

Pick one script from evidence, launch it, and add the second only when you can see demand. Scripts aren’t a hedge: a second version adds a full review and upkeep cycle.

1. Buyers on the mainland

   Simplified, Baidu and Bing

2. Buyers in Taiwan or Hong Kong

   Traditional by region, Google

3. Singapore

   Simplified, Google

4. Diaspora or unknown

   Check the evidence, then one version first

Check these in order:

1. Your existing inquiries. Note where Chinese-speaking contacts are based, and which script they write in.
2. Your sales team. Ask which markets they’re actually trying to reach.
3. Your analytics language report. Look for zh-CN, zh-TW and zh-HK. It shows a device setting, not a buyer, and Google Analytics can miss visitors from China.

Chinese speakers abroad are the hardest case, and the sources are vague.

The Unicode FAQ lists overseas Chinese communities under Traditional.⁵ EC Innovations says the same of many of them, and that older generations may prefer it.²² LinguaLinx said in 2016 that this was changing with mainland migration to the US.²³

None gives figures, and nothing else we read does. So ask your own contacts where they’re from.

Our guide to mainland China or the diaspora covers the targeting decision.

The bottom line

Start from where your buyer lives. That gives you the script, the search engine, the vocabulary and the review you need.

Treat conversion as a first draft, keep one script per URL, and be wary of anyone who sounds certain about how Baidu treats Traditional pages.

How Index in China can help

We work on Chinese search engines. We translate your site into Simplified Chinese with a human reviewer and work on getting it indexed there.

If your buyers are really in Taiwan or Hong Kong, that’s a Google project, and we’ll tell you so. See what we do or book a 30-minute call.

Book a 30-minute call

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