WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system. Easy to use and entirely customizable, it is used by millions of websites around the world. It does not come with the built-in capability to create a multilingual website. Though it is used by many non-English websites. Luckily, translation plugins for WordPress are a great solution to make the process easier.
WordPress multilingual websites plugins are a great way to open up your site to the entire world. Adding them will be beneficial to your user experience and your organic traffic. In this article let’s find out the best plugins and see which one is the most suitable for you.
How to choose translation plugins for multilingual websites on WordPress?
Firstly, how should we choose the plugin? There are so many plugins that you might feel like your head is spinning. To make it simpler, when starting, ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you need to download a language pack to use the plugin?
- Do you need to use a third-party web app like Google Translate?
- Is the plugin for manual translation or automatic translation?
SEO support
The main reason many businesses go for a multilingual website is to reach a wider audience. Without SEO support, your website won’t be organically reached, resulting in your efforts backfiring. That is why you need to make sure that your translation plugin is SEO-friendly. It will help you increase your website traffic and have a higher ranking in search engines.
Automated vs. Human Translation
Before going for plugins, you also need to come to the final decision: should you get your website translated automatically or should you go for human translation? For localization, it is better to hire a professional translation agency that knows the best methods to translate a website. An automated translation would be the right solution if you aim to allow users to specify a language optionally.
Top 7 translation plugins for multilingual website
Now that you have decided to go for a translation plugin, we have prepared the list of the top 7 multilingual websites plugins.
Weglot
Weglot is many professionals’ favorite. It allows you to translate your website into over one hundred languages quickly and without coding. Weglot comes with a user-friendly interface and is SEO-optimized. With a massive amount of flexibility, it provides 3 easy ways to translate your site. The easiest and quickest method it offers is machine translation. It also gives a manual translation option. With Weglot, you can also get a professional translation. Once the translation agency translates your website and the content rolls in, it’s automatically added to the translated version of your site. The professional translation option is the most expensive one, but it’s also the most accurate.
WPML
WPML (The WordPress Multilingual Plugin) is one of the oldest and most reliable plugins for creating multilingual WordPress websites. It is a premium-only plugin allowing you to use as many languages as you want. With WPML you can translate your content as well as themes and plugins. Based on the number of features, WPML offers 3 premium plans. The con is that there is no free and machine translation option. If you don’t want to translate manually content, then WPML connects you to leading translation services.
WPML is compatible with most major WordPress themes and plugins. WPML also integrates with e-Commerce solutions to create a multilingual store.
TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a newer option that is somewhere between Weglot and Polylang/WPML. With a convenient interface, you can quickly and easily translate 100% of the website. It permits you to translate both posts and pages from the front end of your website and the behind-the-scenes metadata. It is also 100% self-hosted. TranslatePress supports both manual translation and automatic translation via the Google Translate API. For the manual translation option, if you work with professional translators, you can assign a special “Translator” user role to any user on your site. It is good for security as those users can translate your content without needing full access to your admin area.
Polylang
Polylang is one of the best free translation plugins in terms of features. It’s lightweight and easy to use. Polylang enables you to create different versions of your post assigning each one to a specific language. What you’ll get is a new language switcher addition to the WordPress post editor. You can use as many languages as you need. With Polylang WordPress language packs are automatically downloaded and updated. The plugin takes care of multilingual SEO and is compatible with major SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO. The only con is that you have to do all of the translations manually.
GTranslate by Google
Powered by Google Translate, GTranslate offers impressive features that combine automatic and human translations. It allows you to translate your website content into 103 available languages. The plugin comes with various widgets making it easy for your users to select their preferred language. It is available in free and premium versions. The automatic translation is done through Google translate. You can manually correct Google’s automatic translation, and it also comes with Google Analytics integration. Google Analytics integration will help you measure and understand whether providing translation on your site benefits your users.
LocoTranslate
Loco Translate offers automatic translation service integration. It helps you translate your WordPress themes and plugins directly into your browser. This plugin is perfect for developers who want to offer international versions of their WordPress themes and plugins.
Google Website Translator
Google Website Translator uses Google Translate to automatically translate your website into over one hundred different languages. It is completely free. With Google Website Translator you can use both a widget and a shortcode. As a single database record stores all the settings, the plugin doesn’t load any external files. It makes it one of the fastest translation plugins. If you don’t want to translate a certain section of your website, the plugin allows you to exclude it.
Translation plugins for multilingual websites are a quick and easy way for website translation. But even though it is faster than a translation done by a professional, the quality cannot be guaranteed.
The truth is that a machine cannot do website localization. So if you are looking for a high-quality localization partner to help you, Verbika comes to the rescue.
