Using te reo Māori on your business website: a practical guide

Short answer: Write macrons as real Unicode characters (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū), not double vowels or a font trick, and check your website font actually contains them. Mark Māori-language text with lang="mi" so screen readers pronounce it properly. Have any te reo on your site checked by a competent speaker before it goes live, and spell your business name and key words the same way on your website, Google profile and social accounts.

More New Zealand businesses now greet customers with "Kia ora", use Māori headings, or offer pages in both languages. Doing it well is mostly care and a few technical details. This guide covers the practical side: getting the characters, code and workflow right. Decisions about how much te reo to use, and what it means for your business, are yours and worth talking through with people in your community.

Step 1: decide how far you're going

There's no single right level. Common starting points:

Greetings and sign-offs: "Kia ora" on the home page, "Ngā mihi" in emails.
Bilingual headings and navigation: Māori and English side by side in menus and section titles.
Selected bilingual pages: an About page or key service pages in both languages.
A full Māori-language version of the site.

Start with what you can do properly and maintain. A few words used correctly and consistently show more care than a large translated section nobody updates.

Step 2: get macrons right in your text

Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (the Māori Language Commission) publishes orthography guidelines for spelling and writing Māori. The version we read states that the macron is the established way of showing a long vowel, and that in text produced on a computer, Unicode macrons should be used.

In practice:

Type them properly. On Windows and macOS you can add a Māori keyboard in language settings; on phones, press and hold the vowel. Then ā is one real character, not "a" with formatting.
Don't fake them with double vowels (maaori), images, or a special font that draws a line over plain letters. Search engines, screen readers and copy-paste all see the underlying text.
Check your CMS keeps them. Paste a test sentence with every macronised vowel, in capitals too (Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū), into a page, a page title, a meta description and an image alt text. Save, then view the live page and its source.
Check names. The guidelines point to standard references for vowel length in words and names. When in doubt, ask, don't guess.

Step 3: check your fonts

A surprising number of web fonts don't include macronised vowels, especially decorative heading fonts. When a character is missing, the browser quietly borrows it from a fallback font, so "Māori" shows with one letter in a different style.

Test your heading and body fonts with all ten macronised letters (five lower case, five capitals).
If a font fails, choose a version that includes extended Latin characters, or change font.
Check buttons, menus and form placeholders, which sometimes use a separate font.
Look on a phone as well as a desktop.

Step 4: mark up the language

MDN's documentation of the HTML lang attribute explains that it defines the language of an element, and that parts of a page in a different language should be marked too, primarily so assistive technologies such as screen readers use the correct pronunciation. The language subtag for Māori in the IANA language subtag registry is mi.

A mainly English page keeps <html lang="en-NZ"> (or en).
A Māori heading or paragraph inside it gets its own tag: <h2 lang="mi">Ngā Ratonga</h2>.
A full Māori-language page uses <html lang="mi">.

Most page builders let you add a custom attribute or a small HTML block for this. If yours doesn't, ask your developer; it's a small change with a real accessibility benefit.

Step 5: bilingual headings and navigation

For headings and menus in both languages, pick one pattern and use it everywhere:

Pattern	Example	Works well for
Māori first, English beneath	Ngā Ratonga / Services	Headings with space for two lines
Side by side with a divider	Mō Mātou · About us	Short menu items
Māori only, English on hover	Not recommended	Hover doesn't exist on phones and isn't read reliably

Keep the menu short enough to fit on a phone with both languages showing. Long bilingual menu items are where layouts usually break.

Step 6: macrons in URLs

You can put a macron in a URL, but it gets percent-encoded behind the scenes (ā becomes %C4%81). Google's URL structure guidance says characters outside the ASCII range should be percent-encoded in links. That works, but encoded URLs look messy when shared and are easy to break when copied by hand.

A practical approach for most small sites: keep URL slugs plain (/maori-services/ or /nga-ratonga/), and use macrons in everything people read: headings, titles and body text. If you do use macrons in URLs, make sure your links, sitemap and redirects all use the same form.

Step 7: get the reo checked

Machine translation of te reo Māori can produce text that's grammatically wrong or awkward. Before publishing anything beyond common greetings:

Have it checked by a competent speaker, ideally someone with translation experience. A certified translator is the safest choice for longer or important text.
Give them context: who the audience is, what tone you want, and where the text will appear (a button needs a different length than a paragraph).
Ask them to check macrons and capitalisation, not just word choice.
Keep a short glossary of the terms you've agreed, so everyone who edits the site uses the same words.

Step 8: be consistent everywhere

People see your business on your website, Google profile, social pages, emails and invoices. If your business name or tagline includes Māori words, spell them identically, with macrons, everywhere, including:

your Google Business Profile name and description
social media bios and page names
email signatures and automated emails from your booking or shop system
receipts, PDFs and printed menus.

On search, people type both with and without macrons, often because their keyboard doesn't offer them. Once your pages are live, Search Console's performance report shows which forms people use to find you, so you can make sure the plain-vowel form also appears naturally where it fits, such as in an FAQ.

Common technical slip-ups

Macrons that look right in the editor but turn into "?" or "Ä" on the live site (an encoding problem; the site should be UTF-8 throughout).
A heading font missing capital macronised letters, so Ā appears in a different typeface.
Page titles and meta descriptions written without macrons while the page text has them.
Automated emails from your booking or payment tool that strip macrons.
Menus that overflow on mobile once both languages are added.
No lang="mi" on Māori text, so screen readers mispronounce it.

FAQ

Should I write "Maori" or "Māori"?

Te Taura Whiri's guidelines use the macron, and so should you on your website, written as a real Unicode character.

Will macrons hurt my search rankings?

There's no reason they should. Make sure the important pages are clear in both forms where it reads naturally, and check Search Console to see what people actually type.

Can I use an online translator for my Māori pages?

Use it for a first idea at most. Have a competent speaker check everything before it's published.

Do I need a separate Māori version of my site?

No. Many businesses start with bilingual headings and greetings and add pages as they go.

If you'd like your site checked for macrons, fonts and language tags before you add more te reo, send us the pages you're planning.