Why make your WordPress theme multilingual?
Have you ever stared at the WordPress.com worldwide activity map for more than 30 seconds? Do I really need to explain why Going Global or making your theme ready for all languages is an important and beneficial thing?
The most important fact that you should know about your theme’s new users is that more than 50% of them would like to use your theme in a language other than English and this percentage will only keep on rising – see the extremely rapid growth in the number of non-English users.
The WPML team will help you make your WordPress theme multilingual
For a few years now, the WPML team have been running a Go Global program. This is not just a title; WPML has a dedicated team of six developers who test each theme and plugin sent to our Go Global program, debug it, add or suggest fixes, and work with authors to make their themes fully multilingual and WPML-compatible.
The program does not stop here; we also maintain compatibility: we handle any issue reported by clients and we keep an open channel with the WordPress developer when any major updates are coming to the theme.
The WPML list of themes and plugins tested and declared compatible by our team exceeds 1000 products, and it’s growing daily! All of the official compatible themes, plugins, and WooCommerce extensions are listed on WPML.org; that way, clients can browse through and choose the best solutions for them.
At the end of the compatibility testing, not only will you have a bug-free multi lingual theme but also we will provide you with a “stamp of compatibility” and share the news of your theme being compatible with our clients. Additionally, we will help you write and share tutorials on how to setup your theme in other languages.
About working in a community
There is one aspect that seems like a side effect of all that work we have been doing for years now but it’s crucial to how we all work in the WordPress community and I’d like to stop and look at here.
We are all developing for users and clients, we are all busy with support tickets, bugs, feature requests, git merges and code reviews … sometimes it’s easy to forget at the end of the string there is a person who is trying to publish a few words or run a business using what we develop
The only way this end-user can achieve his/her goals is by us working together – for that end-user WordPress is a whole system, many times I hear people saying ‘WordPress is responsive’, ‘WordPress is good for SEO’ or ‘WordPress is multilingual out of the box’, programs like the Go-Global we run is a good (proven) example that we can join hands and make our end-users lives (and our own) a lot easier.
How to apply to the WPML WordPress multilingual program (Go-Global)?
So, are you ready? All you need to do in order to assign a new theme (or plugin) is fill out the Go-Global application, and our admin team will contact you with relevant details. And yes, the WPML compatibility testing is absolutely free!
