June 15, 2017
There are many ways to make your Wordpress site multilingual. I’ll run through a few options in this post, and offer some alternatives for multilingual sites.
Best translation service and plugin options
Polylang - https://wordpress.org/plugins/polylang/
This is an open source project, with largely positive reviews and a host of well-designed features.
A commercial offer from the WeGlot company, you can translate up to 2000 words for free using their system. This is an automated system, so caution is needed for text that actually needs to be understood, or to sell something.
Lingotek - https://wordpress.org/plugins/lingotek-translation/
Another commercial offer, compatible with Polylang, Lingotek offers paid-for translation services via their Wordpress plugin. It also offers the option of letting your employees translate your site, which could be useful if they know the terminology best. Although it will take them much longer than a professional, doubling the effective cost, and there may still be errors and omissions through less rigorous QA processes.
Again, avoid their automatic translation offer if you have anything to sell or communicate effectively.
The alternative, as these plugins can render a Wordpress site quite slow, is to try a static site. Static sites produce plain HTML files, rather than constantly making calls to a database. This makes them much faster to use, improving your Google rank and lowering your site bounce rate, increasing the time visitors spend on your site.
We use Hugo as our static site generator. It is open source and extremely simple to use. Hugo has in-built multilingual features, letting you set up a multilingual static site in no time. Get in touch if you’d like to talk through the options for these.
To talk translation, call now on 01332 460 747