How to build a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress website

To access in­ter­na­tion­al markets, it is necessary to publish your website in different languages. With a multisite in­stall­a­tion or a plugin for mul­ti­lin­gual­ism, you can quickly create a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress site.

Setting up WordPress so that pages are displayed in bilingual or mul­ti­lin­gual mode has several ad­vant­ages. Depending on the desired market reach of your company, you may benefit from an extended target group approach, improved SEO rankings and brand image.

Mul­ti­lin­gual content is welcome across major search engines because content is evaluated sep­ar­ately for each language. In this way, your site con­trib­utes more content to search results – by out­put­ting search results in the language of the end user. With a search engine optimised, mul­ti­lin­gual website you can open up in­ter­na­tion­al markets and increase your traffic.

Improved vis­ib­il­ity in mul­ti­lin­gual search engines extends your reach and opens your company up to in­ter­na­tion­al markets. Ad­dress­ing users in their native language makes it easier for them to navigate and explore a WordPress multi language site. Important key figures such as con­ver­sion rate, bounce rate, and time on site can thus be pos­it­ively in­flu­enced.

Ad­dress­ing visitors in their native language not only provides a better user ex­per­i­ence, but creates trust and improves your brand image. A WordPress website that is mul­ti­lin­gual is often perceived as more pro­fes­sion­al by users, provided the trans­la­tions are of a high standard. In this way, you may be able to convert visitors into potential customers.

There are several ways to find out if ad­di­tion­al languages may benefit your web project. You can check internal data to see which languages customers used in their support requests or view country-specific revenues. Or you check with Google Analytics whether it is worth setting up WordPress in multiple languages. To do this, simply select ‘Audience > Geo > Language’ and ‘Audience > Geo > Location’ in the menu. The former targets the set browser language of the visitors, while the latter checks the location. The numbers of page visitors can be improved with a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress page.

Whether you’re using a WordPress multisite in­stall­a­tion or a plugin – before creating a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress, here’s what you should consider:

Before you set up a WordPress site as multi language, you should consider the URL structure you wish to use. Besides a top level domain or sub domain, you may want to consider adding a sub­dir­ect­ory.

Using top-level domains is an elaborate way to set up a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress. In this case for every country you add, you’ll need a separate website and a separate SEO strategy. Thus, the work required is more extensive. A WordPress multi language website can be set up via a multisite in­stall­a­tion and domain mapping or as a stand-alone in­stall­a­tion.

Setting up a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress page using sub­do­mains is far more common. Like a top-level domain, WordPress can be set up mul­ti­lin­gually as a stand-alone in­stall­a­tion or multisite.

Much like the subdomain, setting up a WordPress mul­ti­lin­gual site as a sub-directory is the most commonly used method. Besides the stan­dalone and multisite in­stall­a­tion, a mul­ti­lin­gual website with a sub­dir­ect­ory can also be set up as a single site with plugin.

In order for search engines to correctly match languages and avoid duplicate content for pages of the same language from different regions, you should set hreflang tags.

For a bilingual WordPress page in German and English, the hreflang tags would look like:

German page:

English page:

For ad­di­tion­al languages, add the ap­pro­pri­ate hreflang tags to your WordPress multi language site.

On your mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress page, even small features like captions, keywords, or contact in­form­a­tion should be trans­lated correctly. An only partially trans­lated page does not deliver the same user ex­per­i­ence as a fully trans­lated website. In addition, you should try to translate every single page. If a user swaps language on a subpage, it is important they can view the exact page in their language. Often, website owners redirect users to their home page where trans­la­tions are not available. This practice may increase your site’s bounce rate because the user does not get the in­form­a­tion they need.

Search engines read URLs and file names in addition to the text on the page. Therefore, you should translate URLs, image files, and PDFs into the re­spect­ive language as well.

So that users can im­me­di­ately see available languages it is advisable to place your language selection menu prom­in­ently. Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find their way around your multi language website.

If visitors switch language, the structure of the website should remain the same. This way, they are still able to navigate the page and refer to a structure they may already be familiar with.

If you are not sure which plugin suits your needs you can test several for their mul­ti­lin­gual­ism cap­ab­il­it­ies. Test them one after another to avoid sim­ul­tan­eous use of plugins in­ter­fer­ing and producing errors.

Before you set up your WordPress multi language site, you should back up your existing site. For the im­ple­ment­a­tion, it is re­com­men­ded to set up a test en­vir­on­ment to prevent errors on the live site. The WordPress Staging plugin lets you create a duplicate of your website on a de­vel­op­ment system.

To set up a bilingual or mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress website, you’ve got several options. In addition to a variety of plugins for mul­ti­lin­gual­ism, the content man­age­ment system offers the option of multisite in­stall­a­tion without ad­di­tion­al ex­ten­sions.

WordPress allows you to deploy a website in multiple languages via multisite in­stall­a­tion. Multisite in­stall­a­tion itself lets you run multiple websites in a single WordPress in­stall­a­tion. Use this step-by-step guide to get started.

Step 1: Using an FTP program – e.g. FileZilla – upload the wp-config.php file from the WordPress root directory.

Step 2: To set up a WordPress multi language website, look for the following code snippet in the wp-config.php file:

For the English WordPress in­stall­a­tion:

For the German WordPress in­stall­a­tion:

Above this code snippet, add the following line of code:

Setting up a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress site with a multisite in­stall­a­tion has the advantage that you don't need an ad­di­tion­al extension. This way, you’re not dependent on third-party providers, which is of par­tic­u­lar interest to larger companies. However, the setup is a bit more com­plic­ated and the speed per­form­ance of WordPress and in­di­vidu­al pages can be a bit slower.

In addition to the multisite solution, there are a variety of plugins to create a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress website.

Among the plugins for mul­ti­lin­gual­ism, WPML (WordPress Mul­ti­lin­gual Plugin) is one of the most popular. The plugin is available from around £25 per year, which is worth it because of its excellent support and extensive features. With over 40 languages and in­teg­rated Woo­Com­merce trans­la­tion, you can quickly create an in­ter­na­tion­al WordPress mul­ti­lin­gual website. Besides widgets and page titles, the plugin trans­lates meta title and de­scrip­tions, among others.

A special feature that makes WPML stand out from the com­pet­i­tion is its trans­la­tion man­age­ment. You can quickly and easily assign trans­la­tions to people or teams. Automated trans­la­tions are in­teg­rated and can be in­di­vidu­ally edited. Automatic trans­la­tion is billed via a monthly credit plan or via purchased credits.

WPML is a good solution to set up a mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress site thanks to its numerous features. However, because of the wide range of functions it may take a little longer to get your head around it.

Polylang is a free al­tern­at­ive to set up a smaller mul­ti­lin­gual WordPress site. It supports numerous languages, including some with right-to-left writing direction. WordPress language packs are down­loaded auto­mat­ic­ally. In addition to standard WordPress widgets, post formats, RSS feeds and tax­onom­ies, meta data, cat­egor­ies, and keywords can also be trans­lated.

The handling of Polylang is easier than WPML thanks to the lean feature set. For more features, e.g. Woo­Com­merce support, Polylang offers a paid version. However, this is sig­ni­fic­antly more expensive compared to other plugins.