Want to translate your WordPress website into multiple languages? This article is for you. In this article, we explain how to create a multilingual website with WordPress by presenting 4 popular premium plugins.
1. What is a multilingual WordPress website?
A multilingual website is one in which users can access the same content in different languages. There are simple ways for WordPress-based website owners to achieve this.
A multilingual website can work with an automatic switching system based on the user’s browser language or region of residence. It is also possible to offer the user a selection of languages on the website.
2. Why should you create a multilingual site?
If your target audience is made up of speakers of different languages or if you are addressing people from different parts of the world, it is essential to have a multilingual site.
Having a multilingual website will help you increase your visibility on the international scene and therefore your commercial potential. It will allow you to reach a larger number of people. A multilingual website is also often necessary for commercial websites. (You can also read our article “8 best e-commerce themes for WordPress ?” )
Just make sure you know the technical phrases and slogans that can be used for marketing in the languages you use. Automatic language translators, no matter how free, cheap or easy they may seem, will not help you reach your target audience. This is because the translations they provide are only word-for-word translations. Your website users, your potential customers, will consider it a poor quality translation.
3. How to create a multilingual website with WordPress?
There are two methods you can use to offer two or more language options on a WordPress-based website:
Build a separate website for each language.
To do this, you can buy a different domain name for each site. For example, mywebsite.com and monsiteweb.be. You can also buy a single domain name and create a sub-domain for it, for example mywebsite.com and en.mywebsite.com.
You can use custom menus to link your sites together. By adding a specific link to each menu that points to your other site, you can easily switch visitors to the other language.
An easier way than the first method is to use plug-ins.
There are many free and paid multilingual plug-ins designed for WordPress. Moreover, they are usually compatible with the premium themes you purchase and will not cause you any SEO problems.
If you just want to focus on the content quality of your website, these 4 plug-ins will give you full satisfaction in terms of translation and SEO:
WPML is compatible with many of the WordPress themes we have featured on this site as well as many popular plug-ins such as Yoast, Contact Form, Woo Commerce, etc.
Whether you have a personal blog or a professional agency site based on WordPress, WPML offers a quality service. Select the languages for your site and start translating your content. You can translate your content into over 40 languages and even add different language variants such as Quebec French and Australian English with the WPML language editor.
WPML’s machine translations are fast and of high quality, optimized by Google, DeepL and Microsoft. With this type of translation, you can save time and then start a review process and make any changes to the texts that you deem necessary or desired.
To get a human translation, if you have a team of professional translators, you can add them or get help from translation services that partner with WPML.
WPML will also help you create a multilingual and multi-currency e-commerce site. It will also give you the ability to translate the plugins and themes you use.
Pricing: To avail WPML services, you need to pay $39 per year for the blog package, $99 for the multilingual CMS package and $199 for the multilingual agency package.
It is a free and easy-to-use plug-in that you can manually translate your website content. With Polylang, you can translate not only posts, pages, tags, media and categories, but also custom post types, widgets, navigation menus and URLs.
Polylang is compatible with all major SEO plug-ins and automatically supports multilingual SEO, such as html hreflang and Open Graph tags. It also allows you to use a directory, subdomain or domain name for each language.
Polylang helps you build SEO-friendly URLs for the languages you use on your site, and is compatible with the most popular WordPress SEO plugins. You can use a sidebar widget to offer your visitors a choice of languages.
You can’t translate your WordPress theme or plugin with Polylang, so we recommend downloading a good string translator such as “Loco Translate” if you intend to use this popular and useful plugin.
Although it’s free, you need to buy the Pro version to get premium features. Again, the standard plugin does not support e-commerce. Therefore, you will need to purchase the paid Polylang for WooCommerce or Polylang Business package.
Pricing: Polylang Pro or Polylang for woocommerce for 99 euro for 1 site per year. Polylang Bussiness Pack costs 139 euros for 1 site per year.
Weglot offers you a practical, user-friendly and high quality translation service for over 100 languages. You use Weglot’s website to translate all your content, manage the translations and publish them directly to your website.
It automatically detects and translates your website content using leading neural machine translation providers.
It offers a free service for micro websites (i.e. up to 2000 words in one language). In addition, it proposes 5 packages with monthly or annual payment plans depending on your needs.
Weglot is SEO friendly. It offers essential services such as SEO-friendly URL support, automatic insertion of hreflang tags, metadata (or image alt tags) translation, support for multilingual WooCommerce sites, a language switch button, third-party translation services.
It may cost you a little more than other paid plug-ins, as the price varies depending on the number of languages and words translated. So you need to think carefully about your needs and make a decision.
This is a popular and high quality plug-in. It is used by internationally renowned organizations and companies. You can see them on the Weglot website.
Pricing: Basic package for one language with a maximum of 10,000 words, 99 euros per year, Commercial package for 3 languages with a maximum of 50,000 words 190 euros per year.
Pro package for 5 languages 490 euros for a maximum of 200,000 words.
TranslatePress promises the best way to translate your WordPress site directly from the front end, with full support for complex themes and site builders. Convenient to use. It allows you to translate all components of your website.
TranslatePress is ideal for manual translations. You can translate yourself or assign a specific translator role to any user on your site.
If you find manual translation difficult, you can use Google Translate integrated for machine translations. You can then make manual corrections.
The plug-in builds SEO-friendly URLs for all languages and gives you a boost in local SEO results.
TranslatePress is also compatible with WooCommerce and almost every premium WordPress theme you can find on the market today.
The best thing about TranslatePress is that you can see the changes with a live preview. You don’t even have to go back and forth to make changes. So you get the job done faster and with less effort.
Pricing: TranslatePress offers 3 packages with annual payment: personal package for 1 site 89 euros, professional package for 3 sites 159 euros, development package for an unlimited number of sites 249 euros.
4. What is the impact of a multilingual website on SEO?
Creating a multilingual website with WordPress allows you to reach more visitors. Multilingual websites are desirable to search engines. Because their goal is to provide rich results to their users.
When you create a multilingual website, you must have a good knowledge of the language you are translating and be familiar with its culture.
Your goal when creating a multilingual website with WordPress should be to reach the reader in every language you use. Your visitors should be able to find the same quality of writing in languages other than the main language of your site.
Pay attention to the following points to improve your search engine ranking:
1. You must create dedicated URLs for your different languages.
2. Use hreflang attributes to help search engine spiders determine both the language of your pages and the region for which they are intended. You can do this without worry using the plug-ins listed above.
3. Each URL should be listed separately in the sitemap of your site that you submit to search engines (for example, what you uploaded to Google Search Console).
4. The keywords you choose are very important. You must place them in the text without exaggeration, in a natural way that will not leave the reader unsatisfied. To choose regional keywords, you can use tools such as “Answer the Public”
5. Translate your metadata. Make sure that the names of the images you use are unique. Image names are also important for SEO. Add your keyword to the ALT tag.
6. Try to use only one language on a page. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Wouldn’t you feel uncomfortable if you were reading a text carefully and were suddenly confronted with another language?
Conclusion
First, think about why you need a multilingual website. If you are determined, remember that you need time to reap the benefits of your project. The plugins listed above will help you create a multilingual website with WordPress. Listen to your visitors, consult with them if possible, track their behavior on your site. We advise you not to use free automatic translators just to give the impression of offering a lot of language options. They can do you more harm than good. If you want to get started for free, the free version of Polylang will meet your needs.
If you found this article useful, please share it.
Do you have any questions? Please leave a comment or contact us at the email address below.
