In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses and content creators. However, when aiming to engage a global audience, language barriers can limit your website’s reach and effectiveness.

Building a multilingual WordPress site offers a powerful solution, enabling your website to cater to users from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

In this post, we’ll explore the significance of multilingual websites, how WordPress can be used to create them, and a step-by-step guide to setting one up.

1. Expand Your Global Reach

The internet is a global platform, and providing content in multiple languages can significantly broaden your audience. By overcoming language barriers, you allow users from different regions to engage with your products, services, or content. Research shows that people are more likely to engage with and make purchases from websites that are presented in their native language.

2. Enhanced User Experience

A well-implemented multilingual website improves the user experience by making your content accessible and easier to understand for non-English speakers.

This not only boosts engagement but also builds trust, as visitors feel their needs are being accommodated.

3. Better SEO Performance

Search engines like Google factor in language-specific content when ranking sites in international search results. Having a multilingual website increases your chances of ranking higher in country-specific search results, driving more organic traffic to your site.

4. Increased Conversions

Building a connection with your audience in their native language goes beyond simple translation. It’s about understanding and reflecting cultural nuances. A website that resonates with different cultures can significantly improve conversion rates, enhancing your business outcomes on a global scale. 

*We Accept No Liability For Site Issues – Ensure A Competent Expert Delivers This

The first step in building a multilingual WordPress site is selecting a plugin to manage translations and language switching. Here are three of the most popular multilingual plugins:

WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin): WPML is a premium plugin that supports over 40 languages and enables you to add additional languages as and when required. It’s ideal for larger sites or eCommerce platforms that require complex translation features.

Polylang: Polylang is a free plugin with premium/paid for add-ons. With it you can create a bilingual or multilingual site by managing translations directly from your WordPress dashboard – this really helps to keep things easier to manage.  It’s a great choice for simpler websites and blogs and often a good place to start.

TranslatePress: TranslatePress offers a visual approach to translating your site, allowing you to translate directly from the front-end. It comes in both free and premium versions, making it accessible for a wide range of website owners.

Each plugin offers different features, so choose the one that best fits your functionality and business needs, and importantly budget.

Once you’ve selected a plugin, the next step is to install and configure it:

1. 1. Go to your WordPress dashboard: Click on “Plugins” and then “Add New.”
   2. Search for the multilingual plugin: Enter the name of the plugin you’ve chosen (WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress) in the search bar.
   3. Install the plugin: Click “Install” and then “Activate” to enable it on your website.
   4. Configure settings: The plugin will guide you through the configuration process, where you’ll select the languages you want to support and determine how translations will be handled (manual vs. automatic).

With your plugin set up, it’s time to start translating your content, depending on the plugin you choose, as they will all work differently.

You can either manually translate your posts, pages, and media or use machine translation as a starting point.

For manual translations:

1. Go to your post or page editor: You’ll see a new option to switch between languages.
2. Translate each page/post: Select the language you want to translate into and input the translation manually or hire a professional translator for the best results.

For automatic translations:

1. 1. Enable automatic translation: Some plugins, such as TranslatePress, integrate with Google Translate or DeepL to automate the translation process.  A handy time-saver.
   2. Review and edit: Do ensure you review what you have and edit as needed.  As we know sometimes plugins give you 90% of what you need but the extra 10% often can be really important.  Also – consider the premium options as well as sometimes they can be money well spent.

A key feature of any multilingual site is the ability for users to switch between languages.

Most multilingual plugins offer built-in language switchers, which can be added to your menu, sidebar, or footer.

Make sure the language switcher is easily accessible and prominently displayed so that users can toggle between languages without any hassle.

Apart from posts and pages, other elements of your site may need translation, including:

Widgets: Some plugins allow you to translate widget content, such as contact information, testimonials, or product descriptions.

Menus: You’ll need to create language-specific menus to ensure navigation is consistent across different language versions.

Themes and Plugins: Ensure your chosen theme is translation-ready and compatible with the multilingual plugin to avoid issues with translation.

To maximise the reach of your multilingual website, focus on multilingual SEO. Here are a few best practices:

Use hreflang Tags: These tags tell search engines about the different language versions of your content and help prevent issues with duplicate content.

Translate Metadata: Make sure you translate meta titles, descriptions, and URL slugs for each language version of your content.

Submit to Google Search Console: After setting up new or different language versions, submit your multilingual sitemaps to Google Search Console so search engines can properly index all versions of your site.  It’s really well worth the time to do this or ask your developers or marketing company to do it.  There is no point in missing this part out when you’ve come this far.

Before launching your site, thoroughly test each language version to ensure translations are accurate, the layout is consistent, and the language switcher functions smoothly.

Make sure to test your site on mobile devices as well, as international users may access your content on a variety of devices.

Once you’re satisfied, it’s time to launch your multilingual WordPress site and start reaching out to a global audience!

There is little point in doing all this work if you are not covering your bases.  Ensure you have back ups before you launch your site and you should have these during testing as well.

It’s just a basic thing to get right when you do this amount of work on a website.

A robust back up process is a must, just to ensure you have a get out of jail free card!