WordPress is a platform that powers more than 43% of all websites. With its popularity, many WordPress users serve non-English or multilingual audiences. So, it’s potential for you to reach and provide a better user experience to your global audience with a multilingual website.
You can create a multilingual WordPress website by following the steps in this comprehensive guide. We will cover everything from understanding the basics of multilingual sites to advanced features and strategies for optimizing your site for search engines and engaging international audiences, whether you want to translate your content or use automatic translation services manually.
The Importance & Benefits of Having Multilingual WordPress
Creating a multilingual site is crucial for reaching a global audience and providing a better user experience. With a multilingual site, you can accommodate visitors from different countries who speak other languages. By delivering content in their preferred language, you enhance their online experience and increase the likelihood that they will stay on your website.
Tap Into New Markets
One of the significant barriers to reaching the global market is the difference in languages. Millions of potential customers may visit your website but quickly leave because they need help understanding the content. By offering your site in various languages, such as Mandarin, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Russian, you open your doors to a vast and diverse audience. This move increases your website traffic and significantly expands your potential customer base, allowing you to penetrate previously inaccessible markets due to language constraints.
Boost SEO and User Experience
Multilingual sites can have a significant impact on SEO and user experience. Here’s how:
- Improved visibility: Translating your content into multiple languages can increase your visibility in different-language search results, leading to higher organic traffic and more potential customers.
- Better user experience: Offering content in multiple languages ensures visitors can consume your content in their preferred language. This improves their overall experience on your site and increases the chances of engagement and conversions.
- Localized content: Multilingual sites allow you to create localized content for specific regions. This enables you to target keywords particular to those regions and attract more targeted traffic.
- Increased trust and credibility: Offering content in multiple languages establishes trust and credibility with your global audience. It shows you understand their needs and are committed to providing relevant and valuable content.
Increase Conversion Rates
Your content naturally attracts a larger audience when it resonates with the reader’s language. This strategy increases visitor numbers and enhances the likelihood of converting them into customers. They feel more comfortable and assured purchasing from a platform that speaks their language, fostering trust and simplifying product selection. Websites like these encourage more extended visits, encourage further exploration, and ultimately motivate visitors to purchase and click that ‘buy’ button.
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Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Multilingual WordPress Site
There are various translation plugins available online to make your WordPress site multilingual. A simple method is to install a WordPress translate plugin to handle the content translation.
WordPress is compatible with many translation plugins, including highly regarded AI-powered translation plugins like Linguise. Setting it up is straightforward. Just install and activate Linguise on your WordPress site. Next, within the plugin’s settings, you choose the languages you wish to include on your site. Let’s dive deep into it…
For complete steps, continue reading the following explanation.
Step 1: Register Linguise Account
To start, sign up Linguise account by providing your name and email, and proceed to create your account. Following registration, you’ll gain access to the Linguise dashboard. Then, add your site’s domain and fill in the necessary details.
- For the “Account” section, enter your Linguise account credentials.
- Enter the website URL.
- In the “Platform/CMS” category, select WordPress.
- Select the primary language for your website in the “Language” section.
- Indicate the languages you want to add for translation in the “Translation Languages” section.
Click “Next Step” to proceed to the following page. Here, you’ll find an API key that you’ll need to paste into WordPress later, so click “Copy to clipboard.”
Step 2: Install Linguise AI Plugin on WordPress
Switch to the WordPress dashboard; you need to install the Linguise WordPress plugin here. Plugin menu > Add new > Search for Linguise > Install > Activate.
Step 3: Enabled API key
Once you have installed the plugin, navigate to the Linguise menu on the screen’s left side. You will see a display similar to the one shown below. In the column labeled “Linguise API key,” paste the API key you obtained from the previous Linguise dashboard. After pasting the key, click the “Apply” button to save the changes.
Step 4: Customize language switcher
You can customize the language switch button before translating your website. Use the Linguise dashboard to set language displays, positions, icons, flags, and names. You can display flags only, names only, or both. Choose short names or full language names. You can even set the name of the language using its native language and select the flag style you prefer. Preview the language switcher to ensure it looks perfect.
Once the button is customized, it’s time to see its results on the website page. Below is an example image of a language switcher on a website.
Step 5: Try translating the website
After customizing the language switcher, it’s time to test the Linguise integration by translating the web page. For instance, we can translate this English page into Japanese.
After clicking on the Japanese in the language button, all page elements, including buttons and paragraphs, will be automatically translated within seconds.
Step 6: Review the translation using a live editor
The Linguise AI plugin can translate automatically and manually via the live editor feature. To access the live editor, open the dashboard, select “Live Editor” and choose a language. Edit the automatic translation results by selecting the appropriate part and entering the preferred translation in the “Translation in Japanese” column. Click on “Save” to apply changes.
Tips for Creating Multilingual WordPress
Creating a multilingual WordPress site can expand your website’s reach to a global audience. Here are some useful tips.
- Avoid Duplicate Content with Dedicated URLs: Keep your multilingual WordPress site SEO-friendly by avoiding duplicate content. Instead of separate domains, use one domain and add language tags to the URL. For instance, turn www.example.com into www.example.com/id for an Indonesian version.
Google recommends three ways to do this:
Country-specific domains (www.example.id)
Language subdomains (id.example.com)
Language subdirectories (example.com/id/)
- Implement SEO techniques: Optimize your content for search engines in different languages by researching and implementing language-specific SEO techniques. This includes adding SEO keywords, URLs for each language version, meta tags, multilingual sitemap, etc.
- Implement hreflang tags: Hreflang tags are HTML codes that indicate the language of a webpage. To use them, include the language and country code on every site webpage in the head section. Use “x-default” for the main language and ensure all pages follow the same tagging format, consistent language and country codes.
- Enable user language switchers: Language switchers are key to a smooth experience on multilingual sites. To improve user experience, ensure the switcher fits your site’s look and feel, including style and colors. Offer various ways for users to pick a language, like flags or names. It should be easy to switch languages and clear which language is active.
- Creating culturally relevant content: To make your content hit home with people from different cultures, it’s important to understand their world.. Start by learning about their customs and what they value. Then, translators or creators from those places should be brought in because they know the culture and language inside out. Instead of just translating your content, tweak it to fit the cultural vibe of each audience. Adding local stories or sayings can also make your content more relatable.
Conclusion
Creating a website using WordPress that supports multiple languages can provide many benefits. These benefits include broadening your audience’s reach, increasing website traffic and engagement, and improving sales conversions. A multilingual website is a must if you want to expand your business globally. WordPress is an excellent choice for this purpose since users widely use it.
When creating a multilingual WordPress site, use a translation plugin that matches your site’s and business’s needs.
