Want to Create a WordPress Multilingual Site: Here’s how

Last updated on September 15th, 2023 at 06:54 am

Do you wish to make a WordPress website that is available in multiple languages? Making your website multilingual can attract and engage a much wider audience but in some cases creating a multilingual site is not only the developer’s job as you too can design it easily by using a WordPress translation plugin.

For building multilingual sites, you don’t really have to set up a multi-site or have different installs for each language. There are different approaches to achieve this. One is to manually translate all the content into languages of your choice and another is to add machine translation of your current content using the Google Translate service.

Setting up a multilingual site can be easy by integrating different plugins. In this article, we will be looking at some of the important methods that you can incorporate in order to make a multilingual site. Before jumping on to any plugin, you need to answer a few questions that will satisfy the needs of your customers and business. Let’s begin.

Are you looking to rank your content in different languages?

Firstly, you need to consider appropriate reasoning as to how crucial multilingual SEO is for your website. Ask a few questions like do you want to rank your content on top for Google?

There are many WordPress translation plugins that will help to create a fully indexable version of your website for ranking at the top in Google. These plugins let you make use of subfolders, subdomains and separate domains as it makes no real difference from an SEO perspective because Google lays out the other pros and cons of each one of them.

After creating an indexable site, there are other multilingual considerations like hreflag tag for creating XML sitemaps for various translations of your website. For instance -TranslatePress comes with a Yoast SEO integration which lets you create sitemaps in different languages.

Still, if you do not give a thought about multilingual SEO then you might use a much simpler solution like Google Language Translator. The plugin helps to translate your content into any chosen language as per the user’s wish dynamically. It can be a disastrous approach from an SEO perspective but hey it is also the simplest and easiest way to create a multilingual website. There are other plugins you may try out for this purpose – TranslatePress, WPML, Weglot, and Polylang.

Don’t you think about providing the correct translations?

If you are thinking of an accurate translation of your website then it can definitely require you to put more effort by sticking to any particular tools for manual translation or getting a freelancer to do it for you. Moreover, you can save more time by making use of automatic machine translation which has improved to become a lot more accurate.

You can try your hands on the Weglot plugin which is SEO-friendly for your multilingual site and gets started within 30 seconds of installation. Also, WPML and TranslatePress make it easy to access the automatic translation by applying sitewide machine translation.

Is it easy to translate every piece of information?

There are a lot of little pieces when it comes to creating a WordPress multilingual site. Other than the content of your site page, you need to consider themes, plugins, page builders, SEO, alter texts, and much more. Mostly, all of the translation plugins let you translate everything by charging some of it which is more convenient than others.

Major of the plugins help you to translate everything but some may charge more for it and some are even more convenient than others. For more convenient options, you can try TranslatePress and Weglot as they come with structured translation interfaces.

Managing a multilingual site can be tough at times

Various WordPress multilingual plugins give you glimpses of the side-by-side interface which is also supported by WPML. Other plugins only duplicate the WordPress editor for every translation with no interfaces while some may give you a live preview of your website where you can just click on the test you wish to translate.

Other than the interface, it is also crucial to ask yourself if you need the help of other people to access translations. For instance – TranslatePress and WPML allow dedicated Translator accounts while Weglot adds contributors to its cloud dashboard.

Always keep a check on your Budget

In the end, after looking at each and every feature of the plugins, you can definitely not afford to overlook the price. Some plugins are open source and free to use whereas some need to get paid exclusively. Among all, Polylang and TranslatePress are the most genuine free versions whereas Weglot is free for up to 2000 words so you are required to pay for its premium version. Pay a closer look at its price listing and choose the right one for your site.

WPML – starts at $79 per month
TranslatePress – starts at €79 per month
Polylang – starts at €99 per month
Weglot – starts at €9.90 per month

One should answer all the given questions and then make an appropriate choice for generating more business.

The Road Ahead

Creating a WordPress multilingual website can be a complex endeavor so you need to spend more time thinking about a few crucial questions before you try out any of the plugins. The WordPress plugins are the most easy to use and user-friendly and can be installed and used by any user from professional experts and little to no technical knowledge users as well.

Ensure to check the functionalities of the plugins like SEO-friendliness, accuracy, translation completeness, interface, and price. If you really want to have a good and free option that works for most of your situations then give a shot to TranslatePress which claims easy to get started with the help of its video tutorials. We hope this article has helped you to get the information you want to get in order to create a multilingual site. There are other plugins than mentioned in the article for enhanced user experience. Keep Learning!