Are you looking to build a multilingual WordPress website?
WordPress is the dominating content management system (CMS) that powers more than one-third of the total websites on internet. The main reasons behind the popularity of WordPress is its ease-of-use, being open source, no need of coding, great for blogging, etc.
So, if you have an existing website or looking to create a new WordPress website or blog, and want to make it multilingual, then this article is for you. Before going into how to build a multilingual WordPress website, let’s first clear what exactly it is.
Suggested reading: WordPress security guide: 8 best tips to secure WordPress website
What is multilingual website on WordPress?
A website that can provide your content to the visitors in more than one language is called a multilingual website. For example, if you are from India, then you would want to serve your content in Hindi and English both. In order to do this, you have to make your WordPress website multilingual.
After making your site or blog available in multiple languages, your visitors will be able to choose the language of their choice or their regions.
How to create a multilingual website on WordPress?
So, now that you know what a multilingual website exactly is, the next step comes how to create multilingual website on WordPress.
There are three best ways to do it. With each way, you can allow the users to convert your webpages, blog posts, tags, categories, etc. into more than one language.
The first way is to hire a content writer who can write the content in multiple languages or who can convert your English content into regional languages or the ones of your choice. This is by far the best way to do it, because you can try to make your converted content SEO-friendly. Also, nothing beats the manually and dedicatedly written content.
The second way is to use language translation tools like Google Translate on your website which will convert the content into the language selected by the visitor. However, these translation services are not that accurate and reliable. The meaning of your content might get different once it is automatically translated. Moreover, most of such services are not available for free.
Lastly, the third way to do is to use WordPress multilingual plugins.
Here, we will talk about two ways only— hiring a content writer or translator for your website, and using a WordPress plugin. Here we go.
Suggested reading: 4 best ways to find dead or broken links in WordPress
Hire a content writer for your website
The professional content writers are great at writing user-friendly and SEO-optimized content for your site. The content writers can provide you high-quality content so that your visitors can get engaged and consider a purchase.
If you are not sure where to hire a freelance content writer, then we have got the best solutions for you. We have a team of top content writers who can write content for webpages, blog posts, social media, newsletters, press releases, etc. The content written by our writers is ranking on the first page of Google and other search engines, bringing a high traffic to our clients’ websites.
Use a WordPress plugin
Another great way is to use reliable WordPress plugins. Following are the best WordPress plugins for a multilingual website:
- WPML
- TranslatePress
- PolyLang
You can install any of these plugins to serve your content in multiple languages. There are reasons behind calling these plugins the best ones. First, these plugins help you to translate all your content, whether it is on a webpage, blog post, product description, categories, etc. Second, they are also SEO-friendly to some extent.
Must read: 5 game-changing image optimization methods for WordPress sites
Having said that, let’s move on to how to set up your WordPress site to make it multilingual. We are sharing steps to use and configure the WPML plugin here.
- Open your WordPress dashboard.
- Visit Plugins section and click on Add New.
- From here, search the WPML plugin and install it. Once installed, you have to activate it on your site.
- Once activated, a notification will appear in your WordPress dashboard to configure this plugin on your site. Click on the ‘Configure WPML‘ button in this notification to begin the configuration.
- The WPML setup wizard will open. In this wizard, there are four sections. The first section is to identify the default language on your site, which is generally English. It will be identified automatically by the plugin. In case, the plugin identifies a wrong language, you can change it manually. Once selected, click on the Next button there.
- The next section is ‘Translation languages‘. From this section, you have to select the languages that you want to make available to users. Once you have selected all the languages of your choice, click on the Next button.
- The next section is Language switcher. The purpose of this section is to set three primary languages for your site, which will be available as drop-down or collection of country flags. Users will simply have to click on their preferred language or flag to translate the content. You can set primary languages by easily dragging and dropping. The language switcher buttons can be added to widget areas, footer, or navigation menu. It’s all up to you.
- Now, let’s move to the final step, which is Registration. For successful registration, you will have to enter your site key in the required field. Once done, click on Register button.
If you have followed all the steps as mentioned above, the WPML plugin setup process is done successfully.
This is great plugin for every WordPress site, because you can choose where to apply the translation buttons. You can enable it on specific blog posts, pages, tags, categories, and themes.
Handing over to you:
We hope this guide on how to build a multilingual WordPress site helps you to serve your site to the visitors in multiple languages. All the steps and recommendations mentioned in this article are of great use. If you have any queries, feel free to reach out using the comments below.
Read next: 6 easiest ways to monetize your WordPress blog for free