Creating a multilingual website is not your everyday task. Unless you are a professional WordPress developer, it is highly unlikely that you ever had to create such a website.
But when you have a potential audience in different countries speaking different languages, you don’t have a choice other than creating a multilingual website.
So, how do you do that? Do you need to translate all the text manually and upload this to separate websites?
Not actually.
There are several WordPress plugins for creating multilingual websites. But only a few of these plugins make it really easy. Weglot Translate is one of those few plugins.
Among all the translation plugins, Weglot offers the easiest solution for creating multilingual websites. Continue reading to find out how you can get your multilingual website with Weglot within five minutes.
Why we Need this Plugin?
If your target audience speaks different languages, you need to make sure that your website is available in those languages. WordPress doesn’t offer any built-in features to develop multilingual websites.
I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A GOOD EXPERIMENT TO TRANSLATE NEILPATEL.COM INTO 82 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. WITHIN THREE WEEKS OF DOING THIS, I SAW A 47% INCREASE IN MY SEARCH TRAFFIC. Neil Patel
When installing WordPress, you will be asked to choose a language. But that language will be available on the backend only. For developing a truly multilingual website, you have two solutions – create separate sub-domains or use a plugin.
Creating a separate sub-domain for each language is not a practical idea. You are essentially creating separate websites for each language, which means you have to manage and monitor all of these sites actively.
Using a plugin is the best way to create multilingual websites on WordPress. While there are several WordPress plugins that allow you to do so,
Weglot Translate is definitely the best choice out there.
Compared to other translation plugins, Weglot makes it a lot easier to create and manage multilingual websites. Check out the next section to know more about the features and capabilities of Weglot.
What can I do with this Plugin?
Weglot Translate is a very powerful multilingual plugin that is radically different from the other plugins offering the similar service. How is that? Continue reading, and you will find out yourself.
Seamless Integration
First of all, Weglot offers a very simple integration process. Unlike the other plugins, there are no complex coding, configuration, or source file manipulation processes involved.
You just install and activate the plugin, create an account, provide the API key on your website and that will be all. The whole process takes less than five minutes, but that’s all you have to do.
Automatic Language Detection
Once you connect your website to Weglot, the intelligent system will automatically detect the language of your existing content. The system will also offer translations in your desired languages. This eliminates the lengthy translation process and helps you save precious time.
Simple Translation Management
As I said above, Weglot makes it a lot easier to manage the whole translation process. Once you define the target language(s), the system will automatically translate your website.
There are multiple ways to manage the translated text. To do that, log into your Weglot account and get to
the dashboard. You will find two options to edit your translations –
- Visual Editor and
- List of translations
The visual editor will show a live preview of your website. You can translate each text by clicking on the text itself. The system will show the translation for your chosen language(s). You can do this for all the text on your website.
Clicking “List of translations” will take you to a list of all the translations on your website. There are separate icons for the Text, Media, and Meta (SEO) translations. For each translation, you can check out the original text, translated text, and provide your own translation. There will be separate icons to accept or reject the translation or send it to a pro translator.
It is also possible to set up translations rules. These rules allow you to define specific words/phrases which should be translated in a special way or not translated at all.
Another handy feature allows you to search for a specific word and replace it everywhere. This could be very useful when any word has been translated incorrectly, and you want to correct it.
SEO-friendly Approach
Weglot follows all the SEO best practices in translating your content. The traditional translation plugins use JavaScript to translate content on-the-fly. That means the search engines will find the content only in the original language.
On the other hand, Weglot performs the whole process on the server. That means your website will have separate content in all languages, leading to a better crawling by the search engines. Therefore, your content will be indexed in different languages, increasing your visibility in the local searches.
What’s more, the plugin will automatically create dedicated URL of your content for each language, translate the SEO tags, and create the necessary href lang tags. All of these are recognized best practices for multilingual website SEO.
Other Features
Along with the features mentioned above, Weglot also comes with several other perks. First of all, the plugin works with any theme or plugin. That means it doesn’t matter which theme or plugin you are using right now, you can rest assured that Weglot will work perfectly on your website.
The automatic language detection is another notable feature of Weglot. This will automatically detect which default language their browser is using and show the website in that language.
Since the plugin handles the translation process on the server, there is no need to update or manage the plugin on your website, which ticks off another maintenance task from your shoulder.
Once you sign up for the premium plan, you are entitled to get any help you want from the professional customer support team.
Premium Features
Weglot offers several add-ons with their premium plans. First of all, you can choose more than one languages with the business and pro plans.
The premium plans come with a convenient visitor language redirection feature. That will be very useful for automatically detecting the default language of the browser and displaying your website in that language. This could be a great way to enhance the user experience.
Other notable add-ons include premium support and access to pro translators. These will make sure that you can make the most out of this excellent multilingual plugin.
How to use Weglot Translate?
Once you install and activate the plugin on your website, you will notice a new menu item titled “Weglot” on the dashboard. Click on that icon to go to the settings page.
You will need an API key, which you can get for free by
registering an account with Weglot. Copy the API code and paste it into the desired field on your website. At this point, the plugin will automatically detect the original language of your website. The next field allows you to define which language(s) you want to translate your website into. You have to use the
two-letter code for the languages.
Click the “Save Changes” button located at the bottom of the page. This will show a pop-up telling you that your website is now multilingual.
Check out your website, and you should notice a language switcher icon at the bottom-right corner or the screen. You can configure the switcher style from the “Weglot” menu. Log in to your Weglot account to check out your current plan, current usage, the number of languages, and get access to the visual editor and list of translations.
If you prefer videos, check out this
detailed video to view these steps in action.
Pricing
Weglot operates on a freemium business model. There is one free and three premium pricing plans available.
The free plan allows one website, one language, and is limited to 2,000 words only,
The premium plans are priced between 99€ to 490€ per year. The starter plan allows one website, one language, and 10,000 words. On the other hand, the Business and Pro plans allow one and three websites, unlimited languages along with 500,000 and 2,000,000 words respectively.
All premium plans include access to pro translators, visitor language redirection, and premium support.
Check out the
pricing page to know more about the pricing plans.
Conclusion
That was my opinion after using Weglot for an extended period of time. But what about you? Do you have any experience in creating multilingual websites?
And now that you know about the Weglot Translation, what do you think about this plugin? Let me know by leaving a comment below.