Disclosure: WP Mayor is a professional review site that sometimes receives compensation from companies to promote their products. Each product is tested and our honest opinions are shared publicly. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed below are our own.
As a website owner, you want to ensure that you’re reaching the widest audience possible. After all, that’s the best way to increase your views, click-throughs, conversions, and so on. While there are a number of ways to expand your audience, offering content in multiple languages is one of the most effective.
Translating your site by hand would be difficult, of course, especially if you don’t speak the target languages. Fortunately, WordPress users have access to tools that simplify this task immensely. Weglot, for example, is a user-friendly yet powerful plugin that can translate your entire website in just minutes.
In this post, we’ll look more closely at Weglot, discuss its key features, and talk about how it compares to the competition. Let’s chat!
Introducing Weglot: A Leading Multilingual WordPress Plugin
If you’re going to offer your website in multiple languages, you have a few options. You can translate it yourself, but that can take a lot of time, and requires pre-existing knowledge. You can also hire professional translators – an option that can get extremely expensive.
What if you want accurate translations, but you don’t have a lot of time or money to spare? That’s where Weglot comes into the picture:
Weglot is one of the leading WordPress plugins for creating a fully multilingual website. Its goal is to help developers, web agencies, freelancers, and business owners design websites in multiple languages, without any hassle.
For that reason, it’s used by 50,000+ sites:
In the WordPress Plugin Directory alone, it boasts over 20,000 active installations, along with excellent reviews and ratings:
For example, the Baltazare web agency uses Weglot to successfully design multilingual websites for its WordPress clients. They cite the plugin’s ease of use, smooth integration, and reliable support as some of its most attractive features. Their latest project, the 2019 International Chemistry Olympiad site, is an excellent example of Weglot in action:
If you’re looking to create something similar, Weglot is an option worth checking out. Let’s take a closer look at why that is.
Weglot’s Key Benefits and Features
So, how exactly does Weglot work? After installing it on your site, you can choose one or more target languages. The plugin will then translate all your content into those languages within minutes. Plus, it will continue to translate new content that’s added to the site.
After that, all your visitors have to do is select the language they want from a simple drop-down menu:
What’s more, you’ll get access to a dashboard where you can manage your translations. You can see what’s been translated, make your own custom edits, and even hire a professional to make sure it’s as accurate as possible.
You have two options when it comes managing your translations. The Visual Editor will let you make edits while viewing the actual web page, which means you can see your changes in context right away:
If you prefer, there’s also the Translations List, a more traditional but still powerful option. It displays your original content to the left, and translated content to the right:
Both versions of the editor can even be used collaboratively. Therefore, your entire team (as well as any translators you hire) can contribute to the project of making your site multilingual.
Other key features offered by this plugin include:
- It’s easy to install, set up, and start using – even for beginners.
- Weglot is compatible with (and will translate content added by) all WordPress plugins and themes, including WooCommerce and popular page builders.
- Performance has been optimized, so you shouldn’t experience any slowdowns on the front or back ends.
- The plugin follows Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices for multilingual websites.
- You’ll get access to both machine and human translation capabilities, and can seamlessly combine the two.
- There’s a dedicated support team you can reach out to for help.
- The free plan and free trial period mean you can give the plugin a shot without any risk.
Weglot includes plenty of more advanced features as well, such as a ‘private mode’ for translation editing, functionality for automatically redirecting visitors to their preferred languages, email translation, importing (available in beta) and exporting options for XLIFF files, and more.
What Weglot Offers Over the Competition
Of course, there are lots of other WordPress translation plugins out there. Despite its extensive feature set, you may still be wondering why you might choose this particular tool over all the rest.
Weglot offers a number of advantages that can make it a more convenient solution than its top competitors. Polylang, for example, requires a lot of manual effort to create each translated page. It lacks a built-in automatic translation system, doesn’t provide built-in direct access to professional translators, and some themes and plugins require specific compatibility (most are compatible). In contrast, Weglot includes all of those features out of the box.
WPML, another popular option, has many of the same issues. It does offer automatic translation, but it’s limited on the free tier, and you’ll still need to create each page by hand. All the plugins and themes you use will have to be WPML-ready if you want to translate their content.
That’s not to say that these plugins can’t be useful. However, if you’re looking for a full-featured solution that will translate your entire site in minutes and let you manage those translations easily, Weglot stands out from the crowd.
Conclusion
If you’re not careful, translating your website can turn into a major project. You probably don’t have a lot of time to spare, so you’ll need to find a way to make your site multilingual with a minimum of effort and fuss.
As we’ve shown, Weglot is an excellent solution to that problem. This plugin will translate your WordPress content automatically, and provide you with a centralized dashboard for editing the result. You can even get professional translators to review your content, combining the best of both machine and human translation capabilities.
Do you have any questions about how to use Weglot on your WordPress website? Ask away in the comments section below!
2 Responses
Many many thanks for your informative article. I think you have written your best.
Thank you for your kind words, Kavya! 🙂