Do You Need a Korean Website? (2026 Guide)
When a foreign company needs a Korean website, what an English site misses in Korea, landing page vs subfolder vs .kr, and costs in KRW.
Usually yes, if Korean customers will find you through search, pay on your site or contact you in Korean. A Korean landing page is the minimum, and most companies selling directly to Korean users end up with a Korean section of their main site with its own URLs. If your Korean business is a few B2B accounts that already work with you in English, your English site and a Korean company profile can carry you until demand is proven.
This guide helps you decide which case you are in, shows what a global English site misses in Korea, compares a landing page, a subfolder and a full Korean site, and lists what to prepare before you brief anyone.
Do you need a Korean website? A short answer by business type
The answer depends less on your industry than on who reads the page and what they do next. This is how the decision usually falls out:
| Business type | What Korean visitors need | Usual starting point |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS sold self-serve to Korean teams | Korean pricing, sign-up, billing and help pages | Korean subfolder on your main domain, then localize the product |
| DTC or e-commerce brand selling to consumers | Korean product pages, Korean checkout, seller information required by Korean law | Korean store or a Korean section with local payments |
| B2B or industrial supplier with a distributor or a few accounts | A credible overview, specifications and a clear contact route | Korean landing page or a short Korean section |
| Services, education or tourism with Korean customers | Inquiries or bookings in Korean, a KakaoTalk contact option | Korean section with a Korean inquiry form |
| Hiring or investor relations only | A company profile in Korean | A landing page or a PDF profile can be enough for now |
Two questions settle most borderline cases.
- Who has to read the page before anyone buys? An engineer at a Korean partner may read your English documentation without trouble. Ask your partner or first customers which language their purchasing, legal and support staff work in, because those are the people who stall a deal when everything is in English.
- Will money or personal data change hands on the site? If Korean consumers pay on your site or create accounts, the checkout, privacy notice and seller information have to work for Korea. At that point translation is the smaller part of the job.
If both answers point to English, wait. If either points to Korean, plan at least a landing page now.
What does a global English site miss in Korea?
A translated copy of your English site is better than nothing, but the gaps that cost you customers are rarely in the wording. These are the ones we check first.
Search. Google matters in Korea, and so does Naver. Naver runs its own crawler and its own webmaster tool, Naver Search Advisor, where you verify the site and submit a sitemap. An English page has little Korean text to match a Korean query, so it rarely appears for the searches Korean buyers actually type. Our guide to Naver SEO for foreign websites covers the registration steps.
Payments. Korean shoppers expect local cards and wallets such as Kakao Pay and Naver Pay. You can reach them through a Korean payment gateway or, if your company is in a supported country, through Stripe's Korean payment methods. See Does Stripe work in Korea? and Korean payment gateway integration.
Contact. Many Korean businesses offer a KakaoTalk Channel as their main chat contact, next to or instead of email. A Korean visitor who sees only an English email address may simply leave. KakaoTalk Channel and AlimTalk explains how businesses set this up.
Seller information. Article 10 of Korea's E-Commerce Consumer Protection Act requires an online mall operator to display its trade name and representative's name, business address, phone number and email, business registration number and terms of use. Article 13 adds the mail-order registration number when a mail-order business advertises goods for sale. This is why Korean sites carry a dense block of business details in the footer. Whether and how it applies to your company is a question for your Korean adviser; Selling online in Korea summarizes the rules.
Forms. Korean addresses are entered by searching, not typed into street, city and state fields, and names are written family name first. A Western form works, but it feels foreign. See Korean address search API.
Link previews. Korean users share links in KakaoTalk, which builds the preview from your Open Graph tags. Kakao's developer site has a tool to check those tags and clear its cached preview after you change them. A Korean page with an English og:title looks unfinished in a chat.
Landing page, subfolder or full Korean site?
Choose the structure before anyone translates a page, because URLs, analytics and search registration all depend on it.
| Option | What it is | Fits when | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Korean landing page | One page in Korean, often at example.com/ko/ | Testing demand, a trade show, an ad campaign, a B2B introduction | Answers "who are you" but not much more |
| Korean subfolder | Korean versions of your key pages under /ko/ on your main domain | You sell or support customers in Korea through the same company | Every update now has two languages to maintain |
| Separate Korean site | A .kr domain or separate site, often with its own content | A Korean entity, a separate Korean brand or a different product range | Two sites to run, and authority does not carry over automatically |
The .kr option catches foreign companies out. KRNIC, which runs the .kr registry, states that registrants must have a local presence in Korea. Without a Korean entity or address, a subfolder on your existing domain is usually the practical route, and it keeps your existing links working for both languages.
Whichever option you choose, follow Google's guidance for multilingual sites: give each language its own URL, connect the versions with hreflang, and let visitors pick a language with a visible switch. Google advises against redirecting people automatically based on their IP address or browser language, so do not force Korean visitors onto the Korean page. Our Korean website localization checklist has the full list.
A landing page is a reasonable first step only if it leads somewhere a Korean visitor can act: a Korean inquiry form, a KakaoTalk button or a Korean-speaking contact. A landing page that ends in an English form converts like an English page.
How much does a Korean website cost, and how long does it take?
Prices vary with scope, so treat these as reference points rather than quotes. They come from our own pricing catalogue (version 1.1, dated 23 September 2026), in Korean won, excluding VAT.
| What you are building | Range (KRW, excl. VAT) | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| One-page landing page that collects inquiries or sign-ups | 0.8M–1.6M | 1–3 weeks |
| Website, three tiers (the first is a simple CMS build) | 2.6M / 4.4M / 6.0M | Agreed in the quote |
| A second language on a site we build (each further language 0.2M–0.4M) | 0.3M–0.8M | 2–4 development days |
Three things move the number more than page count:
- What the Korean pages have to do. Displaying information is cheap. Checkout, accounts, phone verification or booking add development and testing.
- Who writes the Korean text. Machine translation is a usable first draft. Prices, legal notices, product claims and the privacy policy need a fluent reviewer, and the privacy notice needs Korean counsel.
- Who maintains it. If your marketing team updates the English site weekly, the Korean pages need an owner and a CMS that shows both languages side by side, or the Korean version falls behind within months.
Payment gateway fees, message sending fees and other third-party costs are separate from the build and are passed through at cost.
What should you prepare before briefing an agency?
You will get faster, more comparable quotes with these ready:
- The goal of the Korean pages, in one sentence: collect distributor inquiries, sell to consumers, support existing users.
- The list of pages you want in Korean, and which can stay English-only for now.
- Who answers Korean inquiries, by which channel, and how quickly.
- Your entity situation: whether you have a Korean entity or business registration, or plan to. It decides which payment providers, domains and messaging services you can use.
- Existing brand assets: fonts, colours, photography, and whether your Latin font has a Korean companion. See Korean web design for the typography side.
- Any Korean accounts you already hold, such as a KakaoTalk Channel or Naver Search Advisor registration.
How we handle bilingual sites
We build Korean and English sites in-house. The bilingual work we can point to: the EMECS website, a Korean-English technical site with hreflang between language versions; the UNESCO i-WSSM platform, rebuilt with Korean and English routing and now in operation; and this site, where every public page exists in Korean and English with hreflang and a sitemap listing both. The structure, not the translation, is what we would carry over to your project.
We do not promise rankings on Naver or Google. What we build is a Korean site that both engines can crawl, read and pair correctly with your English pages, and that Korean visitors can act on.
Frequently asked questions
Which search engine does Korea use?
Both Google and Naver, and Naver has its own crawler and webmaster tool rather than relying on Google's index. For a Korean website, register with Google Search Console and Naver Search Advisor, submit a sitemap to each and allow Naver's crawler in robots.txt.
Is a Korean landing page enough?
For testing demand or introducing a B2B offer, often yes, as long as it ends in a Korean way to act: a Korean form, a KakaoTalk button or a Korean-speaking contact. If you sell to consumers or support users in Korea, you will outgrow it quickly.
Do I need a .kr domain?
No. KRNIC requires .kr registrants to have a local presence in Korea, so many foreign companies use a subfolder such as example.com/ko/. Google treats subfolders, subdomains and country-code domains as valid options when each language has its own URL.
Can you build the English and Korean versions together?
Yes, and it is usually cheaper than adding Korean later. Planning both languages from the start means one URL structure, one CMS with fields for each language and hreflang set up once.
Should the Korean site have the same content as the English one?
Not necessarily. Keep the pages Korean visitors need and add what they expect, such as local contact options and seller information. Pages that exist in only one language simply have no hreflang partner.
Sources
All checked October 2026.
- Korea Ministry of Government Legislation, Act on Consumer Protection in Electronic Commerce (Articles 10 and 13)
- Google Search Central, Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites
- Google Search Central, Tell Google about localized versions of your page
- KRNIC (Korea Internet & Security Agency), .kr domain FAQ
- Naver Search Advisor, Search engine optimization basics
- Kakao Developers, Tools: KakaoTalk URL meta information and cache reset
- NQ Solution pricing catalogue v1.1 (23 September 2026)
Planning your first Korean pages
If you are weighing a landing page against a full Korean section, send us a short brief with your goal and the pages you have in mind, and we will tell you which option fits and what it involves. Consultation is in English with our English-speaking founder, and we can meet in person in Korea. For the wider picture of entering the market, start with Korea market entry, or see how we build sites on web development in Korea.