Do you know how to create a multilingual WordPress site? If not, don’t skip this blog: we provide step-by-step guides to make your site multilingual. First and foremost, let’s go over the reasons why creating a multilingual site is important.
Why should you create a multilingual WordPress site?
It is obvious that although you provide rich and valuable content, it is only displayed in one language instead of several. As a result, there are a lot of international visitors who cannot understand what you want to convey because it is not in their native language. This is an important reason why your website never reaches readers worldwide. In addition, creating a multilingual WordPress site brings your website the following great benefits.
- Improve SEO: To create a successful website, running a multilingual WordPress site plays a crucial role in improving your site ranking on Google search results. For example, in most countries, people search using keywords in their native language. In this case, with a multilingual website and SEO efforts, your website will appear in their search results, which means your website has a chance to access a new market and expand your business.
- Expand your reach: with a multi-language site, you can reach a much wider audience, even international markets. In addition, your readers can easily share your site with their friends or co-workers who share the same purpose. It is a great way to gain a place for your brand in various markets.
- Build trust: when your website is displayed in multiple languages, your customers will read and comprehend your website content in their native language without effort. This increases customers’ trust in your website. Moreover, this shows that you care about and focus on your customers.
For these reasons, today we write this blog to help you make your site multilingual without effort.
How to create a multilingual WordPress site?
There are several plugins that you can use to translate your WordPress site into different languages. However, in this tutorial, we picked out the two best tools to help you create and manage translations with ease: TranslatePress and Polylang. Now, let’s dive into the detailed methods.
Solutions
Method 1: Using TranslatePress
TranslatePress is the first remarkable plugin and one of the most popular Translation Plugins that we would like to introduce. This plugin is not only easy to use but also offers you a wide range of powerful features to help you translate your site into other languages quickly. By using this plugin, you can translate the full-page content directly from the front end. One of the impressive things about this plugin is that you can use both machine and human translation.
To learn how to use this tool, let’s go through the step-by-step instructions below:
- Step 1: Installing and activating the plugin
Just like with other plugins, you only need to go to the Plugins section on your dashboard, go to the add plugins option, and then click on add new button. Now, you can search for the TranslatePress plugin on the search bar and install it. When the installation is complete, activate it.
- Step 2: Configure your settings
After you have installed and activated it, visit Settings > TranslatePress to configure the plugin settings.
The free version of TranslatePress only supports up to two languages: the default language of the site and the language you want to add. For example, we choose French as the secondary language.
If you want to add more than one language, you need to install the ” Extra Languages” add-on first. You can download this addon directly under your account after logging in to the TranslatePress website.
Next, at Native language name, you can optionally display languages in their native names, or you can leave this option off if you want the language names to be shown in English.
In the next option, you can select “Yes” if you want to show the default language name in the URL as a subdirectory, for example http://ltheme.com/en/. However, we recommend keeping the default choice for better SEO results.
For Force language in custom links option, the recommended choice is “Yes”, since it will adjust custom links according to the currently selected language. Thanks to that, the URLs are more SEO-friendly.
The final option is language switcher. There are three ways to add a language switcher to your website: using a shortcode, adding a language switcher to your navigation menu, or adding a floating dropdown menu.
After that, don’t forget to click on the ” Save Changes” button to store your settings.
To add a language switcher to your WordPress navigation menu, you need to go to Appearance > Menus and then click on the” Language Switcher” tab as in the image below. Choose the languages you want to show and add them to the menu. At Menu settings, you can freely choose any location to display the language switcher. Then click on the “save menu” button.
In the “Automatic Translation” tab, you can choose how you want to translate your content. If you want your content translated automatically, choose the “Yes” option; otherwise, keep the “No” option.
If you select “Yes”, you need to generate a Google Translate API key to connect to the service. Alternatively, you can upgrade to the premium version to use DeepL automatic translation. You also need to save all the settings before moving to the next steps.
- Step 3: Translating your WordPress pages
Firstly, you need to open the front-end editor by clicking the “Translate Site” tab on the settings page or the button on the top bar menu. The front-end editor lets you see how your page looks in real time whenever you make a change.
After opening the front-end editor, the language switcher menu is displayed at the bottom of the page and in the desktop horizontal menu. Thanks to that, your website visitors can quickly switch between the currently selected languages.
Additionally, TranslatePress allows you to display a language switcher anywhere on your site including inside your sidebar as in the image below.
From here, you can see a set of strings presented on the page inside a useful dropdown list. You can choose any string you want to translate and then it will be shown in the box under the string list. In our case, we select a long string. Now, let’s see the result below.
After the previous step, TranslatePress will allow you to translate the string into your added language by entering the translation in the French Translation box as shown in the example below. Then click on the ” Save Translation” button to save the translated string into the database.
Now, let’s see the result: once we switch to the French version of the page, the translated string will be shown on the site immediately.
Besides using the translation sidebar, you can choose the string which you want to translate by clicking the pencil icon, and it will then appear inside the translation box in the sidebar panel. From there, you can follow the same steps as before to create a translation for any string.
Method 2: Using Polylang
Polylang is one of the most prevalent multilingual plugins developed by WP SYNTEX. This plugin has recorded over 600.000 active installations. It allows you to create a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site without effort. You can translate your posts, pages, widgets, media, post tags, and much more into other languages. This plugin also offers 2 versions: free and Pro.
For this tutorial, we will use the free version of this plugin. Now let’s start.
The installation and activation process of Polylang is similar to TranslatePress, so we won’t repeat it. Now we will go through the detailed steps to create a multilingual WordPress site with the Polylang plugin.
- Step 1: Configure the settings
First, go to the Languages > languages tab on your dashboard. This opens the Add new language section. Here, you only need to choose the language you want to add and it will automatically fill in the following fields: full name, locale, language code, text, and flag. Then click the “Add New Language” button.
To set the default language, simply click on the star icon in the language row you want to select.
Secondly, switch to the “Strings translation” tab. Here, you can optionally set translations for many elements on your site, such as WordPress items (title, tagline, date format, and time format) and Widget items (in the sidebar, footer).
Thirdly, move to the “Settings” tab. Here, there are 3 important options that you should consider:
- URL modifications: you can adjust the appearance of your URLs
- Detect browser languages: If you click on “Active” under Detect browser language, this option ensures that when anyone visits your website for the first time, they are redirected to the homepage in the language based on the language settings in their browser. If the language of their browser is different from the languages on your website, the default language will be displayed.
- Media: If you activate this option, Polylang can help you translate the media item information for each language. It is also a great way to optimize your images for SEO. Otherwise, you can deactivate it.
- Step 2: Translating your WordPress content
Firstly, we will start translating a post on the WordPress site. Go to the menu Posts> All posts on your dashboard. Now, you can view all the posts on your site.
For example, you can see on the screenshot below, we have two posts: one in English and another one that was translated into Vietnamese.
Let’s take a look at the little icons in the screenshot; each icon has a different function:
- The flag icon means that a blog/page is available in this language. You can also click on it to adjust it.
- The pencil icon implies that a translation exists. You can edit it by clicking on it.
- The “+” icon enables you to add a new translation.
In addition, you can also translate your post into different languages on the post edit screen. You can click on the “+” symbol to create translated content and then publish it.
- Step 3: Adding a language switcher to your site
Polylang allows you to add a language switcher to menus, widgets and other areas on your website. This function will help your visitors quickly switch your site to a language they understand. Below, we provide you with an example to add a language switcher to your widgets.
Let’s go to Appearance > Widgets. Simply search for Language switcher in the search bar. Then you can drag and drop this widget to any area on your page.
Let’s view the result below.
Conclusion
We have just provided 2 ways to make your site multilingual by using plugins. If you are wondering which WordPress Multilingual Plugin is better, don’t worry: we wrote a blog to compare the two plugins to help you easily make the right decision for your website. You can read the Polylang vs TranslatePress comparison to learn more.
Hopefully, this tutorial helps you create a multilingual WordPress site without effort. If you have any questions about the matter above or need our assistance, don’t hesitate to mention it in the comment section below. We will support you as soon as possible.
If you want to explore other options, please visit WordPress Multilingual Plugin, which contains a lot of useful plugins for your site.
