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Lunarlink Solutions, Toronto
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Montréal · web design
A Canadian studio building websites for Montréal small businesses across the metro. Restaurants in Mile End and the Plateau, clinics on the South Shore, law firms downtown, contractors across Laval and Longueuil. Fixed fee, four to six weeks, free written audit first.
Ontario studio · serving Montréal & the South Shore
Montréal market
Greater Montréal holds roughly four and a quarter million people, second only to Toronto among Canadian metros. French is the first language of close to two thirds of the population, English of about twelve percent, and the remainder is a mix of languages spoken in Park-Extension, Côte-des-Neiges, Saint-Laurent, and across the metro. That single fact (the language layer) reshapes every other decision a Montréal business makes about its website. A site shipped in English only is not just leaving leads on the table. Under Loi 96 it is also out of compliance with provincial commerce law.
Underneath the language question sit several overlapping economies. The downtown professional-services layer (law, finance, accounting) along Rue Saint-Jacques and through the Quartier International. The independent restaurant, design, and creative economy through the Plateau, Mile End, and Saint-Henri. A tourism layer through Old Montréal and the Quartier des Spectacles that crowds the SERPs for hospitality the way it does in Vancouver. The Mile-Ex AI and gaming cluster carrying the technology side of the city. The trades and home-services economy across Laval, Longueuil, the South Shore, and the West Island. Each economy searches differently, and the site has to know which one its customers belong to.
What does not work in Montréal is the same English template that ships in Toronto. Even a downtown law firm with mostly anglophone clients eventually meets a francophone customer (often the one who pays best) and a single-language site quietly loses them. The rebuilds that work here scope the language question honestly at the audit stage, ship parallel French and English routes where the data supports both, and treat the French version as a destination, not a translation.
The Montréal numbers
Where the work clusters
Montréal searches almost always include the neighbourhood, and very often dictate the language. A restaurant in the Plateau is searched for in French. A law firm on Saint-Jacques is searched for in both. Here is the rough map of who clusters where, and what that means for the site you build.
Downtown & the Quartier International
Law, finance, accounting, and consulting firms along Saint-Jacques, René-Lévesque, and through the financial district. Bilingual is the default. Sites here run parallel French and English routes with full content parity, not a translation underlay.
Old Montréal & the Quartier des Spectacles
Hospitality, tourism, restaurants, hotels, and event venues. High mobile share. Crowded SERPs full of TripAdvisor and aggregator pages. Structured data, proper Google Business Profile alignment, and fast mobile pages do the heavy lifting here.
The Plateau-Mont-Royal
Independent restaurants, cafes, retail, and creative-services firms across Mont-Royal, Saint-Denis, and Saint-Laurent. French-first market. Visitors expect the site to match the neighbourhood. Generic templates read as out-of-place.
Mile End & Mile-Ex
Design studios, tech firms, gaming studios, AI labs, independent restaurants, and creative-services agencies. The mix that built the city's recent reputation. Sites here are judged on craft. Slow heroes and generic stock kill credibility before anyone reads a word.
Little Italy, Jean-Talon & Parc-Extension
Multilingual markets, restaurants, family medical, dental, and small service businesses. French as the primary commercial language, English as a secondary, plus significant Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and South Asian customer bases. Honest scoping at the audit stage matters more here than visual polish.
Saint-Henri, Griffintown & Pointe-Saint-Charles
Design-led restaurants, condo-driven services, fitness, and small professional-services firms rebuilding on a younger residential base. Plain language and clear scoping outpaces brand-led copy.
Westmount & Outremont
Aesthetic clinics, dental, professional services, and family medical serving an established, higher-net-worth customer base. Bilingual is the default. Booking pages and credentialed bios convert better than contact forms.
NDG, Côte-des-Neiges & Snowdon
Family medical, dental, restaurants, and home services across an established mixed-language residential corridor. French and English both significant. Parallel-route bilingual builds are the standard here.
Rosemont, Villeray & Hochelaga-Maisonneuve
Independent restaurants, family services, dental, and small professional-services firms across the east end. French-first. The neighbourhood reads working-class and design-led at once, and the site has to as well.
Laval, Longueuil & the South Shore
Trades, contracting, dental, family medical, and restaurants across the suburbs on both sides of the river. Each one is a separate search market. Service-area pages have to name Laval, Longueuil, Brossard, Saint-Lambert, and Boucherville in plain text or they rank in none of them.
Industries we ship for in Montréal
Different industry? Full list here.
The Montréal playbook
A French version bolted onto an English site with a translate button is the worst of both worlds. Google cannot tell which language to serve, the French copy reads as machine-translated to any francophone visitor, and the structure is also out of step with what Loi 96 expects. The structure that works is parallel routes: one URL per language with proper hreflang tags, real French copy written for the francophone customer, French version indexed independently, and equal prominence wherever both languages appear. The decision is whether you need both, not whether one URL can do both jobs. It cannot.
Every Montréal site has to clear both Loi 96 (the French-language statute) and Law 25 (the privacy statute) from launch. Loi 96 shapes the language structure and the prominence rules. Law 25 shapes the consent language, the privacy policy, the breach-notification process, and (for larger businesses) the appointment of a privacy officer. They are separate regimes, both enforceable, and both have penalties heavy enough that a retrofit after a complaint is more expensive than building correctly from day one. The audit names which gaps the current site has, in writing.
Compliance that touches the build
Any public commercial communication by a business operating in Québec has to be available in French. Where both languages appear, French has to be at least as prominent. That applies to websites, signage, menus, forms, error messages, and email templates. The OQLF can act on complaints, and the penalties under Loi 96 are higher than they were under the previous regime. We scope the French build properly at the audit stage, not as an add-on after launch.
Law 25 is stricter than PIPEDA on consent, on breach-notification timelines, and on data-handling disclosures. Consent has to be explicit and granular. Larger businesses have to appoint a privacy officer and publish their identity. Penalties can reach four percent of worldwide turnover for major violations. The privacy policy, the consent language, and the data-handling disclosures all have to clear Law 25 standards from launch.
If the site collects email addresses, the opt-in language has to be explicit. Pre-checked newsletter boxes are not allowed. Every commercial email needs a working unsubscribe link and a real Canadian business address in the footer. We wire all of this into the rebuild on day one, not as a retrofit later.
What we do
We design the whole visual system for a small business. Logo, website, brochures, invoices. One studio handling it all, so the look stays the same from the homepage to the invoice.
Logo, type, color, and the small details that make everything look intentional. Built to hold across web, print, and signage.
Sites that load fast, read clearly, and turn visitors into calls or bookings. The phone and the form get treated as the point of the page.
Brochures, one-pagers, flyers, decks, trade-show signage. The handouts that have to match the site and the storefront.
Invoices, letterheads, proposals, contracts, estimate sheets. The everyday paper that shapes how a business looks.
What we keep seeing in Montréal
Most Montréal small-business sites lose the call for one of four reasons. The first is the English-only site shipped by an out-of-province agency that did not realize Loi 96 applied, leaving the business technically non-compliant and losing every francophone search. The second is the bilingual site built on machine translation, where the French version reads as broken to any actual francophone visitor and burns trust before the form loads. The third is the tourism-template restaurant or hotel site that loses every search to TripAdvisor and OpenTable before the visitor even sees it, because the site has no structured data and a slow mobile page. The fourth is the design-led independent restaurant site in the Plateau or Mile End that is beautiful, untranslated, and ranks for nothing.
The audit names all four when they are present. The rebuild fixes the structure first, not the look. Parallel French and English routes where the data supports both. Privacy and consent language drafted to Law 25 standards from launch. Phone above the fold on every page. Plain-text suburb pages for each Greater Montréal community you actually serve. LocalBusiness schema and Google Business Profile alignment for hospitality and restaurant verticals. Forms that send, with a backup destination if the primary inbox is down. Page speed under two seconds. Real photos of the work and the team. The design comes after the structure works, never before.
Montréal questions
Don’t see yours? Ask us directly.
Not in Montréal or Laval? We work Canada-wide. Tell us where you are on the contact page and the audit comes back the same way.
Under the hood
The mechanics that decide whether a site earns calls or just sits there.
01Top of the map
‘Roofer near me’ wins your next customer. We build to rank in the local map pack.
78%of local-service searches happen on a phone.
02On the phone first
Most find you on a phone. The whole site has to feel right at arm’s length.
03Loads before they leave
Half of mobile visitors leave a slow site before it loads.
Page speed scoremobile
98/100
04Yours to keep
No retainers, no system you can’t log into. When we’re done, you have everything.
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