WordPress Translation Plugins for Multilingual Websites

A Complete Guide to WordPress Multilingual Plugins

Meta Description: If you’re looking to extend your reach, boost your international SEO, and make more sales, then a high-quality WordPress multilingual plugin is the order of the day. Click here for more information!

Any business wanting to expand its reach can’t ignore that, while English is widely spoken worldwide, English is nowhere near the most spoken language; it's third, with 365 million speakers, after Spanish (405 million) and Mandarin (955 million).

Despite these statistics, English remains the most commonly used language online, with 60.4% of websites using English. If your business has a global reach, not accounting for language can seriously impact your bottom line: research shows that 40% of consumers won’t buy in another language.

So it’s only natural that, by translating your website, international customers can enjoy a better user experience, which leads to more conversions. Various Fortune 500 companies were surveyed, and those that translated their sites were 1.5 times more likely to report increased revenue. With such a decent ROI, it's no wonder the annual projected spend on translation is expected to reach $45 billion globally.

Suppose you have a WordPress site that you’re keen to translate into multiple languages, but you don’t know where to start with the messy business of translating. In that case, the best way forward is to opt for a WordPress multilingual plugin to make life simpler and more profitable.

Why Opt for a Multilingual Plugin?

Any multilingual WordPress plugin worth its salt should help you:

Let’s look at each in turn.

Reaching New Audiences

If you want to grow your business, not only do you have to retain your existing customers, but you also need to engage new audiences. If you’ve identified a fresh target demographic and the language they speak, you’re well on your way to achieving your goal. If not, the simplest way to do so is to use Google Analytics to get a better idea of your:

For example, you might find you have lots of French-speaking visitors, although you're a US business. Or a large percentage of your website visitors are browsing in Spanish or Chinese, but your bounce rate is high. This essential data informs which languages you should spend time and money translating your site into to grow your business.

Improving International SEO

The more people that can reach your website searching in their native language, the better your SEO results will be. Of course, the higher you rank in search engines like Google, the greater your chances of boosting visibility, attracting a wider audience, and consequently, increasing sales and generating a healthier bottom line.

Drive More Sales and Scale Your Business

Multilingual WordPress sites broaden your brand’s appeal, making it easier for customers to spend money with you.

It’s possible that only having an English site will deter shoppers away. China’s largest search engine, Baidu, reported that landing pages in English have an 85% drop-off rate. If you’re trying to penetrate the Mandarin-speaking market, don’t dismiss this. Baidu has more users than Google does in Asia and Europe combined (560m). Plus, China represents the world’s biggest online population, with 618 million online users.

The bottom line is, translation is an inexpensive means of engaging with new customers, especially if you're using an automated multilingual plugin.

However, you may be unsure which WordPress multilingual plugin to go for.

Let’s have a look:

What Are the Top WordPress Multilingual Plugins?

Below we’ve listed four popular translation plugins:

Weglot

Weglot is an out of the box translation solution that works seamlessly with any WordPress theme or plugin (like WooCommerce). It’s fast, providing instant automated translation. You’ll have multilingual content to publish within minutes. Weglot supports over 100 languages and is exceptionally well-reviewed, with 4.8 out of 5 stars on the WordPress Directory and 97% of Trustpilot reviewers giving it a five-star ‘Excellent’ rating.

When you install Weglot, it automatically detects all your website’s content so you can translate it, using the in-context editor to translate directly inside your site’s design and structure to show you first-hand what your translated pages will look like.

The first layer of automatic translation is provided by some of the best machine learning providers on the market, but Weglot also allows you to harness the support of human editing, with your translation team having the power to collaborate inside the backend. Alternatively, you can hire professional translators within the Weglot dashboard to do the heavy lifting for you.

Weglot even creates subdomains for each of the different languages you translate your website into, and Weglot can automatically serve those pages in your visitors’ languages, based on their browser settings. You can also translate your URL slugs too.

Best of all, Weglot also offers tons of free resources and a topic-focused blog, ensuring you have everything you need to make the translation process as simple as possible.

Customers pay by tier according to their website traffic and the number of languages and words that need translating. There’s also a free tier that entitles you to 2,000 free translated words in one language.

Although we’re focusing on WordPress, Weglot is also compatible with all leading content management systems and only takes minutes to install. With monthly prices starting from €9.90, it's certainly an affordable option.

Try the WordPress plugin here.

Polylang

Polylang is another popular WordPress multilingual plugin. Like Weglot, it's well-reviewed, offers a few free resources and a basic free plan, as well as its paid-for packages. The main difference is that it isn't an automated solution. Instead, you have to define the language and manually create each translation page by either hiring translators or translate the site yourself.

Polylang’s advantages are that you get access to unlimited languages, it's SEO-friendly, and it's suitable for eCommerce enterprises. On the other hand, Polylang doesn't offer any kind of customer support if you use the free option, and its lack of automatic translation means that you’re left looking at the additional personnel costs of whoever you have manually translating the site.

Most business packages start at €99 to unlock customer support and automated SEO. As the Polylang plugin offers both free and paid-for plans, it's a good choice for startups to expand their language content as their business grows.

GTranslate

This plugin offers both free and premium services, and can translate any HTML website into multiple languages using Google translate technology. The free version provides automated translation for over 90 languages across your web pages, new posts, navigation menu items, etc. GTranslate offers something for everyone, including those operating on a small budget.

Like Weglot, automated translations can also be manually edited on the front-end to ensure linguistic and idiomatic accuracy. The paid-for versions start at $7.99 a month, rising to the most expensive package at $37.99 a month.

Pages that are automatically translated are hosted on GTranslate’s cloud network. One of its benefits is that URLs are also translated for improved multilingual SEO. However, it doesn’t support manual translations on the free plan, and takes considerably longer than Weglot to install.

WPML

WPML is the oldest WordPress translation plugin around. WPML has a few different plans to choose from, depending on what you need to translate - Multilingual blog or Multilingual CMS - however you’ll need the Multilingual CMS plan if you have a WooCommerce store. The plugin translates your web pages, posts, taxonomy, menus, and theme’s texts.

You can also assign your team members as ‘Translators’ and delegate specific translation jobs for them to complete. WPML also provides lots in the way of international SEO. For instance, you have complete control over how your URLs look, your translation’s SEO metadata, and search engines understand your site’s structure which enables them to send traffic to the right languages.

How Quickly Can You Create a WordPress Multilingual Website?

Our research tells us that Weglot really is the fastest of the three when creating a multilingual WordPress website. It takes four simple steps, and you’re ready to go.

That’s it! Just refresh your webpage, and your site is available in your chosen languages.

In the Weglot tab in your WordPress dashboard you can personalize your language switcher button style (such as choosing a flag icon, drop-down menu, where it appears on your homepage, etc.) and hit 'Save' when you're happy.

Are You Ready to Start Using a WordPress Multilingual Plugin?

Each of the plugins mentioned above help you get the tedious job of WordPress translation done. The most important thing to remember is to check each one’s features and translation services to ensure the best possible fit for your business. Remember to think about what you need now vs. what you’re going to require in the future. This will ensure that whichever you choose, you get good value for money, both now and in the long run. If you’re a startup entrepreneur, your needs will be very different from that of a larger enterprise looking to saturate foreign markets around the world.

No two WordPress multilingual plugins are the same. For example, Polylang asks you to provide the translations, while Weglot boasts automated translations with the option of manual editing. You may be looking for a lower word count option, such as Weglot’s free tier. Alternatively, suppose you’ve got a site with a lot of content, and the more widely spoken languages such as Mandarin and Spanish are your concern. In that case, you might opt for one of Weglot's paid-for packages that provide speed, automation, and professional translation services.