How to make a Multilingual Website

In another article, you can find a tutorial to change the language of your theme to your own language. In this tutorial, you will see all the information you need to translate and display any of your themes into different languages.

Getting the right tool

To make your theme multilingual, you will need to download a multilingual plugin from the WordPress directory. You can also decide to have separate websites (one for each language you want), but this method is less convenient and difficult to manage.

One essential aspect, the plugin has to be compatible and must follow Google SEO best practices for multilingual. There are a lot of multilingual plugins available in the WordPress directory. You may test some of them before making your own choice, but Weglot (freemium) is one of the best. It’s compatible with any Theme Trust and SEO optimized.

Setting-up the plugin

You can install Weglot in your WordPress website like any other plugins (from your WordPress admin Click on Plugin -> add-new -> install and activate).

Once installed and activated, go to Weglot settings. You will need 2 required fields:

(i) API key to connect you website with Weglot (you can get your API key by creating a Weglot account here); and

(ii) languages: select your original language and the translated languages you would like to have.

Click on save, and a language button will be added to your website.

Managing your translations

In the example of Weglot, you can use human and/or machine translations. First and by default, your website will be translated with a first layer of machine translations (it is powered by providers like Microsoft). Then, from your Weglot account, you can edit and replace translations by yourself or by involving your team or in-house translator. All your changes will be automatically displayed on your website.

SEO-wise, you do not have anything to do. Dedicated URLs for your translated pages will be automatically created (mywebsite.com/es and mywebsite.com/fr for the Spanish and French versions for example). Hreflang tags will also be automatically added.