How to Make Your WordPress Website Multilingual with Weglot Translate Plugin

If you’re looking to translate and display your website in different languages, whether it’s to increase your audience or to reach more customers, you should be very interested in Weglot plugin.

It is a WordPress multilingual plugin. It enables you to translate and manage your translations. With this plugin, you can deploy and display your translated pages extremely efficiently.

In this blog post, you will learn how to quickly set it up. You will also take a look at how to enjoy multi-lingual features Weglot Translate offers to you.

Weglot was founded in 2016. For this relatively short period, however, its plugin Weglot Translation can boast installations on more than 10,000 websites with nearly 500 five-star ratings on the official WordPress Directory.

In WordPress, you mainly have two options to make your website multilingual.

1. Use a plugin, such as Weglot Translate.
2. Create a dedicated website for each language.

For most cases, the easiest and most recommended approach is using a plugin. It’s easier to perform in terms of technical setup. Also, if you use a plugin to make your website multilingual, you will find it much easier to administer and maintain.

This article focuses on the first approach. You will learn how to setup your Weglot plugin, its key features, and its main benefits vs. competitors.

Setting Up the Weglot Translate

First of all, you need to install Weglot plugin like any other plugins, with one of the two options.

1. Directly from the official WordPress Directory.
2. Via your WordPress admin panel, clicking on the Add new button from the plugin menu

Open the plugin in your WordPress dashboard.

1. Select the Original Language setting for your website.
2. Select the Destination Languages setting you would like to add to your website.
3. Add your API key to the API Key field to connect your website to your Weglot account.

•  To get your API key, create a Weglot account here, with your email and a password.

• Click on Save in Weglot plugin settings in your WordPress admin and go to your website.

Visit your website front end. You will notice that a language switcher button appeared. Your site front end visitors can now use this button and browse your site in their preferred languages.

Translations Management

Everything happens on the Weglot account you created.

The first layer of translations is machine based, with a mix of statistical and neuronal technology. Let’s see how you can manage your translations.

On the account homepage, you have a summary of your account main info.

It includes a number of translated words, languages added, selected plan, usage, and other useful items.

You can edit, improve, or replace translations provided by default. To perform these tasks, you have two easy to work tools:

1. The Translations List.
2. The Visual Editor.

Tool #1. The Translations List

The Translations List displays your original content items on the left. You will see their related translations on the right side.

To edit a content item translation, you simply click on it and change it. Your translation then is automatically saved and instantly displayed to your website visitors.

You have several utilities helping you to easily manage the translations list.

• The Search bar to find specific content
• Filters to select and display specific languages pair or a type of translations, automatic or human.
• URL list on the left to target a specific page.
• A breakdown of text, images and SEO items.

The second additional tool you find very useful to edit your WordPress content translations is the Visual Editor.

Tool #2. The Visual Editor

The Visual Editor lets you edit translations directly from your WordPress site front-end pages. This way you can see the context of the page while translating it. Once you saved your translation work, you can instantly check how it looks on your site front end.

A green pencil icon appears next to your content when you hover over it with your mouse. When you click on this icon, translations pop up and you can easily edit them.

In addition to these two editing tools, you can also use rules and apply them to all your translations.

Translations Rules

You can generate two types of rules to be applied to all your translations.

• The Never translate rule. Never translate a word or combination of words (never translate “xx”). This rule is very useful for brand names or product names you would like to keep the same in all languages.

• The Always translate rule. Always translate a word or combination of words in a certain way (always translate “yy” in “zz”). This rule is very useful for specific vocabularies dedicated to a certain industry or a specific activity.

Language Button Customization (Optional)

The language switcher button is one of the key elements of your website design. You will very likely prefer that its design would nicely co-ordinate with the design of the rest of your website. With Weglot Translate you can choose and edit the button appearance with already pre-set options.

Select if you prefer to display the button as a drop-down or as a list, with or without flags, with or without language names, to name a few. You can also add to the button design your own custom CSS rules.

For the position of the button, you can use a shortcode or a widget.

Take a look at the following two examples of a customized language button.

Auto-redirection

This feature is available for all premium plans. When you activate it, it allows you to automatically display the visitors’ language. For example, if you have a website in English and you added French, then a French user visits your website, they will be automatically redirected to the English version of the page. It improves visitors experience and conversion rate.

Multi-websites Management and Team Collaboration

Available starting from the Pro level plan, the multi-site management and team collaboration features allow you to manage multiple websites from only one Weglot account. For each website, a project is created, with same tools and features available with the entry-level accounts.

To collaborate in each project, you will also be able to send email invitations to other team members, clients or in-house translators. You can also set their rights within the project.

Weglot Main Benefits vs. Competitors

There are numerous other multilingual plugins available within WordPress ecosystem. You may ask what benefits Weglot offers comparatively to its competitors.

Benefit #1. Simple Setup and Ease of Use

It will take you only a few minutes to set up Weglot Translate. You do not need to manipulate .po or .mo sources files.  Weglot will automatically detect all your content to translate it.

Benefit #2. Compatibility

Weglot technical approach allows us to offer a solution compatible with any WordPress theme and plugin. You do not need to do anything to make it play nicely with your themes and plugins. No need to contact themes and plugins developers about it.

WooCommerce is one of the examples of such a plugin. Weglot Translate is compatible with WooCommerce straight out of the box.

Benefit #3. SEO Optimized for Multilingual

Weglot follows Google SEO guidelines best practices for multilingual content. It makes sure your translated pages are properly indexed and optimized for Google bots. Weglot Translate automatically handles and manages it for you.

• Translations on server side, in the source code of your website. And not a simple dynamic change (JavaScript) of your content that Google could not see.
• Unique and dedicated URLs automatically created for each version of your page, using subdirectories (/fr and /es for French and Spanish for example).
• Hreflang tags automatically added in your source code, essential to make sure Google will be aware of the different versions of a page and will index them.

Benefit #4. Automatically and/or Human-Created Translations

By default, Weglot offers you access to automatic translations from the best providers on the market. Most notable among them is Microsoft.

Once you acquire them, edit your translations with various tools. With the Pro plan, invite others to collaborate with other teammates on the translation project.

Benefit #5. Access to Professional Translators

Order professional translations directly from your Weglot account. Simply select text strings or pages you need to be translated. Then order their translations from professional agencies you can find directly under your Weglot account.

Once your order is fulfilled, usually within two to three days maximum, find the translations readily integrated and nicely displayed on your website. It is that easy!

Benefit #6. Dedicated expert support team

At Weglot we have a dedicated team of ten well experienced full-time professionals. They actively work on developing and improving Weglot Translate WordPress plugin and service.

Conclusion

Weglot offers a powerful multilingual solution, yet easy to use, to translate and display a website in different languages. SEO optimized and compatible.