The Importance of a Multilingual Website
With the advent of the internet, businesses are no longer confined to dealing with people within a geographical proximity. In fact, they now have the opportunity to sell their products and services to people in the next city or even outside the country. The magic word here is the web. We all know how the web provides incredible opportunities for increasing income and profit. However, to maximize reach, companies need to sell their products and services to people in the next city around the world or even globally. And that’s why they need a multilingual website.
Site Plugins
The development and support of multilingual websites require software, as well as processes and web content management methods. Creating and maintaining a multilingual website costs website owners more. The best solution for that is using multilingual plugins for WordPress to translate your site.
As we know, WordPress is not inherently multilingual. We need to install plugins to support various languages. Let’s review the top 3 multilingual plugins for WordPress:
WPML
Since 2007, WPML has been the most popular multilingual plugin. It is a premium plugin and comes with one year of premium support. It allows you to create multilingual websites. The standard WordPress installation can be used with WPML. This plugin manages all translated versions on its own. WPML can be used to translate pages, custom post types, categories, custom fields, posts, websites, plugins, and WordPress management.
WPML is compatible with numerous themes and plugins and is frequently updated by WordPress webmasters.
While WPML is excellent in many ways, it might not be the choice if you prefer simplicity. This multilingual WordPress plugin has a somewhat complex structure and needs to hook into and filter WordPress functions to display only content that matches the language. Moreover, to maintain translation grouping, you need to manage several additional tables.
WPML supports translation for over 60 internal languages, and you can even add your own languages.
Polylang
Polylang is a name where WordPress language packs are automatically downloaded and updated. It is mostly compatible with SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO, taking care of multilingual SEO, such as HTML hreflang tags and open graph tags. It also makes choosing a directory, a subdomain, or a domain for each language easy.
It has only one drawback – the plugin author does not support the free version of Polylang.
So, for now, that’s it! I hope this post helps!
TranslatePress
With tools like TranslatePress, you can easily control all aspects of translating your site. As the name suggests, this plugin essentially enables you to translate posts and pages from the front end of your website and lets you see what you’ve translated in real-time with a live preview.
Here, you can quickly and easily translate any written content you have: posts, pages, cloud data, plugins, and even your theme. There’s no need to switch interfaces, as everything works seamlessly.
For those of you who are perfectionists and prefer manual translations, TranslatePress allows you to input the text yourself. You can assign a special translator role to any user on your site. These translator users can translate your content without needing full access to your admin section and keep your site secure.
By using plugins, you can easily make your website fully multilingual.
