Expand Your Website’s Global Reach with a Multilingual Plugin

Making your WordPress website available to everyone in the world, regardless of the language they speak, is a great way to build your brand, increase your email subscriber list, and deliver great content to a larger audience base.

Creating killer content, optimizing your website, becoming mobile-friendly, and marketing the right audience is not always enough. You are probably missing out on a lot of visitors by not making your website multilingual. Luckily, there are plenty of great (and affordable) WordPress plugins on the market that can help you make your site multilingual.

Today we will take a look at a wide variety of WordPress plugins to help you manage your translated content.

Weglot

Weglot, a free WordPress plugin, is an easy way to translate and manage your multilingual WordPress website. It works by automatically detecting, translating, and then displaying your translated site for you. The same goes for any changes you make to your site – no need to manually trigger translations for your new content, as Weglot translates those right away.

Then, you have the option to leave the first layer of automatic translation as-is or modify the translations yourself on the Translation List or the Visual Editor. You can also order professional translations directly from the Weglot Dashboard, which is uploaded and displayed for you. 

Weglot gives you full editing capabilities—benefit from adding glossary rules and translation exclusions to speed up the translation process. 

Plus, Weglot is multilingual SEO friendly. It translates your metadata for you, automatically adds hreflang tags to make you more visible on search engines, and hosts your translated content under language subdirectories. 

Weglot also makes it easy to collaborate. Add your team members to your project, assign them roles such as translator or manager to fine-tune access to your translations.

Pros

• No coding knowledge required and over 110+ languages available.
• Plans for every need and budget.
• Instantly translated site in minutes.
• Simple and user-friendly interface, no learning curve
• Fully compatible with all WordPress themes and plugins.
• Automatic, manual, and professional translation options for maximum accuracy.
• Collaboration features included in every plan; no need to purchase seats
• Multilingual SEO friendly and indexed by Google.
• Highly rated support: over 1,640 5-star reviews on WordPress

Cons

• Free for websites under 2000 words with one translation language, which is limited.
• Even some of the premium plans are for one website only and have strict word limits.

While promising, Weglot does have a limited amount of words with the free plugin. However, if your budget allows, the speedy automatic translations, easy translation management, and the ability to fine-tune translation output might be worth a premium purchase.

WPML

WPML is a premium multilingual plugin solution that has grown in popularity because of the robust features it offers. Depending on the pricing plan you choose, you can manually translate all of your content or have it done automatically. You can also hire world-class translators to help you out.  As an extra bonus, WPML can connect you with professional translators that come at an affordable rate.

Pros

• Integration with WooCommerce makes it the only multilingual plugin automatically translating your WooCommerce products and information.
• Technical support in a variety of languages is available and regular updates come included at no extra cost.
• Easy to use with minimal configurations.
• Works well with any WordPress website that uses WordPress API.
• Use on unlimited sites with one purchase.
• All content is SEO optimized and is indexed separately to ensure best practices and consistency.
• Over 40+ languages available with option to add your own using the intuitive WPML language editor.

Cons

• It’s not free. Although with three different price points, all at reasonable rates, it may be worth it for your website.
• Potential admin slowdown (that does not affect your website); although this is currently being addressed by the developers.

Altogether, WPML is one of the most popular multilingual plugin option available for managing your translated content. For instance, most developers test their website’s multilingual capabilities using WPML which lends to its reliability.

In addition, WPML’s company offers great support and has a strong standing in the WordPress community. Despite the cost factor, the features provided really make for high-quality translations that are easy for you to manage on the back end so your visitors can enjoy your content on the front end.

TranslatePress

TranslatePress main differentiator is that it allows you to translate all your site content directly from the front-end, using an intuitive visual translation interface. You simply hover over a certain string, click it and enter it translation. The changes can be seen in real time.

Pros:

• Really easy to use for beginners looking to make their site multilingual
• Due to its front-end translation approach, it works out of the box with any theme or plugin including WooCommerce or page builders
• Supports both manual and automatic translation (via Google Translate)
• It’s SEO friendly, offering support for page slug, title, description, as well as social graph information. The HTML lang attribute is properly set.

Cons:

• The free version is limited to 2 languages only (bilingual websites)
• Full multilingual SEO support is offered in the paid versions

It’s a nice and intuitive approach to translating your WordPress site, especially for non technical users. It has some paid add-ons for things like automatic language detection or setting up translator accounts.

Google Language Translator

Google Language Translator is a free WordPress plugin, not brought to you by Google itself, but built on top of the popular Google Translate translation tool. This plugin offers you the option to add a simple shortcode into posts, pages, or widget areas that you want automatically translated.

Pros

• Very simple to set up with little to configure.
• Support of over 80 languages powered via Google Translate.
• Offer site visitors an easy way to switch languages.
• Inline or vertical layout options for the best visual appeal.
• Google branding can be turned off.
• Automatic translation so no need to manually translate content or hire a professional translator.

Cons

• Automatic translations mean potential translation errors which can cause content to read incorrectly.
• Search engines may consider translations spam if indexed.
• Some users claim the plugin causes issues with their back end admin area translating into other languages. The solution requires extensive coding which not everyone is comfortable with.

Altogether, if you are looking for a cost effective and quick translation solution, Google Language Translator is a great option. Despite some of the disadvantages of using an automatic translator, it still gets the job done.

Lingotek

Lingotek is another free multilingual plugin for WordPress websites. It uses cloud-based localization and translation for managing your multilingual website. This includes sourcing translations from automatic machine-powered sources, opting for community involved translations, or tapping into Lingotek’s marketplace of over 5,000 linguist experts for hire.  As a result, you simply write your content and choose your language; the plugin does the rest.

Pros

• Cost cutting and consistency are achieved using three translation solutions.
• WordPress admin language is interchangeable.
• Use as many languages on your website as you want.
• In-progress page checks of content in the process of being translated.

Cons

• You must register an account with Lingotek.
• Automatic translations are free only up to 100,000 characters.
• Community based or automatic translations leave room for translation errors.
• Professional translating can be expensive.

Lingotek is a solid solution if you are on a tight budget and are not concerned with the occasional translation error. However, if you take advantage of the three translation solutions, chances are your content will be translated accurately.

WPGlobus

WPGlobus is one of many multilingual plugins in a set ready to help you manage your translated content. The main focus of WPGlobus is to provide you the tools to manually translate all of your content.  There are several other free plugins that work alongside WPGlobus that you can check out here. Additionally, there are some premium extensions that can help you translate an online shop.

Pros

• Free with several free add-ons for getting the best translated website possible.
• Compatible with many popular WordPress plugins.
• Display admin interface in different languages.
• Add many languages to your website with custom combinations of flags, locales, and language names.

Cons

• No automatic translation ability; manual translation is time consuming or costly if you don’t have knowledge of several languages.
• Manual translations limit language displays.
• Though a WooCommerce premium extension is available, again, reaching a large audience with hand translated content may be difficult.

This extensive plugin has a lot of potential but still only caters to a select group of website owners.  Only those with the knowledge, time, or budget to manually translate all of their content can benefit from it. However, this plugin does lend itself to accuracy with manual translations presumably performed by native speakers.

Final Thoughts

There are so many different multilingual plugin choices to pick from for your WordPress website. And most of them offer a variety of helpful features and translate effectively.

While the plugin that you choose will depend on things like budget and features, it is important you think long-term. A solution like Weglot will cost a little money upfront but will provide several benefits. Among those are top quality translations, automatic translations, excellent support, WooCommerce integration, and a ton of features the free options simply cannot keep up with.

Have you used a multilingual plugin on your WordPress website to expand your global presence and reach viewers from around the world? I would love to hear all about it in the comments below!