Creating and managing one website can be a lot of work. There are a lot of different things that needs to be taken care of to make sure that your website, content and functions all work the best that they can.
In the midst of all this it can be daunting to then also have to run multiple translated sites and set them up to begin with. It can be beneficiary to have multiple sites with different languages, as it can broaden your potential audience and depending on your type of website it might be a crucial thing to be able to include.
If you were to do all of it manually and code most of it, that can be a difficult process to start and navigate. But luckily there are many solutions out there for WordPress, that can help to set up a multilingual website and works with you to the extent that you want it to.
When you need start the process there are a few things that you need to have taken care of before. Especially, if you aren’t planning to code all it on your own. Those things are:
If you already have a running website, then you probably already have the first two established, but you might need to look into them again depending on the solution and plugin that you choose. If you end up running a multisite, then it might need a little extra in your hosting plan or multiple different domains.
But it can be hard to know your needs until you have found the solution that you want to use to set up your multilingual site. We have gathered a few different solutions, so you can find one that works for you.
First it is important to find out if you need help to translate or not. This is a very important distinction to make. How much help do you need to translate your sites. Here it is important to think about how well you write and navigate in the different languages.
Another thing to think about is how much you can setup yourself and how much help you will need. Is it a simple process that you wish for? Or are you looking more for a structured and easy to navigate setup?
Once you have done this you can go on to think about what solution you want.
There are many different ways to setup a multilingual website, so there is most likely one that fits just right for what you want.
One way that you can do the setup is with a plugin, that does machine translations. This can either be done by programs or AI and usually creates a translated copy of the original page in a language of your choosing. Typically these works by translating entire pages and the themes, plugins and more that works on them as well.
The actual setup of the switching between the different languages can differ from plugin to plugin. But there are many very popular plugins of this kind out there, like WPML, so there is likely one that fits with your needs.
Another way to get your content translated is through external translation plugin, that usually works by directly linking the content of your site to an external translation source like Google translate, DeepL Translate or something similar.
Typically these types of plugins only help you with the translation, and you would need to match them with other plugins to get the full experience.
Another way that plugins can help you set up is with a post by post system, which tends to work one of two ways.
The first it creates a separate post for every language is created, so every that for every post multiples of that is created and stored separately. The second one is that every post stores all alternatives of the original post, grouping them together.
These types of solutions typically works mostly as setup plugins and you would then have to do the translation yourself.
Another way to manage your different languages on your site is through a multisite language switcher. Multisite is an expansion of WordPress that allows you to link together different, and separate, websites, so when you would end up choosing another language you won’t just change to another version of the site, but another site entirely.
This will give you a lot more freedom if you want to include different content on one language’s site, but it might not be relevant for everyone.
These plugins, like the ones that manage by post, tend to not include translation, but is simple for setup purposes.
One of the big questions you will probably end up sitting with is whether you want to use a plugin to help you translate or do it yourself. There are many factors within this that need to be taken into account. It is important to think about if you have the necessary skills to be able to actually translate content yourself.
It is in many ways easier to use a plugin, but machines aren’t always the best at writing and creating human sounding text, especially if you use a lot of phrases and things like that. This can mean that you will end up having to look through everything anyway, so if you believe you can translate it yourself it might be just as easy.
There are also a lot of AI’s and translation tools out there that you can simply use yourself with similar effects to a lot of the plugins. This will probably mean a little more work for you, but might save you on the cost of some of these plugins.
Ultimately, it is a decision made with focus on what your skills are and how much time and money you have to invest in the process. But doing it right can end up benefiting you in the end.
Creating translations and different versions of your website can be a big process to embark on, as there are a lot of different factors that needs to be taken into consideration and the choices can look very different depending on how you choose to mix and match. But there are definitely many different solutions, so there is most likely also one that works for you.
