Speaking your customers’ language builds trust and opens new markets. WordPress makes multilingual websites very achievable.

Three main approaches

Translation plugins

Plugins like WPML and Polylang let you create translated versions of each page, menu and product inside one WordPress site. This is the most common approach.

Multisite

Each language gets its own site in a network. It suits large organisations with separate teams per region.

Automatic translation services

Machine translation is quick, but always have important pages reviewed by a human for quality and tone.

Keep it SEO-friendly

• Use separate URLs for each language (for example /fr/).
• Add hreflang tags so Google shows the right version.
• Translate page titles, meta descriptions and image alt text too.
• Don’t auto-redirect visitors by location — let them choose.

Don’t forget the details

• A clear language switcher in the header
• Translated forms, emails and checkout
• Local currencies and date formats for online stores

We plan and build multilingual WordPress sites that stay fast and easy to manage — see our WordPress CMS development service.

Further reading

• Localized versions of pages (Google)