How to Easily Create a Multilingual WordPress Site
Do you want to translate your WordPress site in multiple languages?
WordPress powers more than 35% of all websites on the internet. Many of them serve non-English or multilingual audiences.
In this article, we will show you how to easily create a multilingual WordPress site. We will cover three different solutions, so you can choose the one that works best for you.
With each solution, you’ll be able to easily translate your WordPress posts, pages, tags, categories, and themes into as many languages as you like.
What is a Multilingual WordPress Website?
A multilingual WordPress website serves the same content in multiple languages. It can automatically redirect users to a language based on their region, or users can select their preferred language using a dropdown link.
There are few different approaches used to create a multilingual website.
The first approach allows you to manually translate all the content into languages of your choice with the help of human translators.
The second method does not actually create a multilingual site but uses machine translations of your existing content by using auto-translate services.
However, Google Translate has stopped supporting new accounts for website translation. The other options are either not-free or not very good in quality.
It goes without saying that manually translating your content is a much better approach. This allows you to maintain quality throughout your website. You can translate the content yourself or hire professionals to do that.
Choosing a WordPress Multilingual Plugin
There are several WordPress plugins that you can use to translate your website into multiple languages. You need to choose a plugin that helps you easily manage translations without making things unnecessarily difficult for your users.
In this guide, we will show you three of the top WordPress multilingual plugins with step by step instructions on how to set them up.
If you know which plugin you are going with, then you can directly jump to the instructions.
All three of them comes with the necessary features you’ll need to make a robust multilingual website.
- They allow you to translate posts, pages, products, and other post types
- You can easily translate your categories, tags, plugins, and themes
- They allow you to set up SEO friendly URLs for each language
With that said, let’s get started.
1. Create Multilingual WordPress Website Using TranslatePress
TranslatePress is one of the best WordPress translation plugins on the market. It is a bit different than other solutions mentioned in this guide.
Normally, multilingual plugins ask you to create multiple versions of the same article in order to translate it. TranslatePress allows you to create translations at the same time.
It also allows you to use a live editor to translate all the visual aspects of your website.
Most importantly, you can combine machine and human translations. This means you can use Google Translate or similar AI-powered tools to generate machine translations and only improve the parts that artificial intelligence missed.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the TranslatePress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
If you want to translate your website to more than one language, then you will also need to install ‘Extra Languages’ add-on. You can do this from the download addons button under your account on the TranslatePress website.
After downloading the add-on, you can install and activate it like any other WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit Settings » TranslatePress page to configure plugin settings.
First, you need to switch to the license tab and enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the TranslatePress website.
After that, you need to switch to the General settings tab to set up other settings.
The first option on the page is to choose the default language of your website, and the languages you want to translate your website into.
Next, you need to choose whether you want to display language names in the native language. The default option is ‘No’ which means language names will be shown in the default language.
After that you need to choose whether you want to display the default language name in the URL as a subdirectory. For example, http://example.com/en/.
The default choice is no which means only the other languages will have the language name in URL as a subdirectory. We recommend leaving this setting as-is for best SEO.
This brings you to the next setting, ‘Force language in custom links’. The default option is ‘Yes’, because that will change custom links for translated languages making the URLs more SEO friendly.
Next, you need to choose whether you want to use Google Translate for automatic translations. The default choice is ‘No’, but you can change that if you would like to use Google Translate.
You will need to provide a Google Translate API key in the next option. You will find a link under the option which will show you instructions on how to get one.
Finally, you will come to the options on how you want to display the language switcher on your website. TranslatePress provides you with three choices.
You can use a short
code, add switcher to your navigation menu, or display a floating menu. We will show you how to add the language switcher to your website later in this article.
Go ahead and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.
Translating Your Website Content
To translate your website, you can simply click on the ‘Translate Site’ tab on plugin’s settings page or the button in your WordPress admin bar.
This will open the live translation editor in a new browser tab.
In this live editor, you can click on any text on your website in the right pane and TranslatePress will load it in the left column to translate
Now click on
the language you want to translate the string into and then provide your translation.
After entering the translation, click on the ‘Save Translation’ button on the top and then click on the next button. TranslatePress will automatically load the next string on the page for you to translate.
You can also just click on the drop-down menu below your default language, and it will show you the list of translatable text strings on the page. You can select a string and then provide its translation.
You can translate all content on any page. This includes navigation menus, buttons, sidebar widgets, meta text, and more.
You can also visit any page by clicking on the links on the screen and start translating that page.
TranslatePress allows you to instantly start translating any page or post on your site when logged in. Simply click on the ‘Translate Page’ button on the top to enter the live editor.
Once you have translated a string, the plugin will automatically translate it for you on other places. For example, if you translated a post title, then the post title in your sidebar widgets will be automatically translated.
Adding Language Switcher to Your Website
Language switcher allows your website visitors to select a language when they visit your website. It usually displays the flag of each country to indicate languages available on your site.
TranslatePress allows you to add language switcher by using a shortcode, as a navigation menu item, or as a floating banner. The language switcher can be displayed as flags, language names, or both.
Adding language switcher in WordPress using shortcode
You just need to add [language-switcher] shortcode to posts, pages, or a sidebar widget where you want to display the language switcher.
Adding language switcher to your WordPress navigation menu
Simply go to Appearance » Menus page and click on the ‘Language Switcher’ tab in the left column. Now select the languages you want to display and then click on add to menu button.