The major goal of any website is to reach the target audience. Or to put it another way, the sites need to be seen, visited and engaged. To make it so, there is the need to speak the language the readers do. We shouldn’t forget that despite the fact that modern informational technologies are usually based on English, there are millions of people who don’t speak English (or at least not as their first language). Thus, at some point you may find that you want to offer more than one language on your WordPress site.
By default, WordPress is not a multi-lingual platform. It was not designed to offer a simple solution for building multilingual sites. But good news is that there are some methods to translate your WordPress website:
- WordPress multilingual plugins;
- WordPress theme with integrated multilingual system.
Multilingual WordPress Plugins
There are some WordPress multilingual plugins which can help you translate your site. Here is a brief review of those plugins.
WPML
WPML plugin will enable you to manage your multilingual posts per language. It will translate all your pages, posts, menus, custom types, taxonomy, etc. into 40 languages. Besides that, you are able to add your own language variant. With WPML there is no need to edit PO files and upload MO files, you can translate theme and plugin texts directly from within WordPress Admin panel.
This WordPress Multilingual plugin provides you with a language switcher widget which can be placed in any widget area without any coding usage. Language options can be displayed as flags or as text. This is a premium plugin which comes with several purchase opportunities: Multilingual blog for $29/year; Multilingual CMS for $79/year and Multilingual CMS Lifetime for $195.
Polylang
Polylang is a free plugin which enables you to create multilingual WordPress site. This plugin lets you use as many languages as you want. WordPress languages packs can be automatically downloaded and updated. You can easily translate the following entities: posts, pages, categories, tags, menus, widgets, etc.
Polylang also provides its users with a customizable language switcher. It is provided as a widget or in the nav menu.
Multilingual WordPress Themes
Apart from multilingual plugins, you can use WordPress themes in order to translate your website. Premium and free are observed.
Divi
Divi is one of the most popular themes in the Elegant Themes collection. Divi comes with over 20 pre-made layouts right out of the box. These beautiful layouts can be used to jump-start your new projects, allowing you to build new pages in just a matter of minutes. This theme is fully translatable and has 32 built-in language translations.
Avada
Avada has been the #1 selling theme for nearly 5 years. It comes with advanced and fully customizable options that allow you to create totally professional websites with no hassle or coding required. This theme is translation ready with the included language files, WPML and Polylang compatible and has RTL built-in.
Travelify
Travelify is a free WordPress theme that is retina ready, features built in theme options for additional customization and provides its users with multiple layouts to choose from. Besides all listed above, Travelify is translation and multilingual ready including support for right-to-left languages. Moreover, this theme is currently available in 18 distinctive languages.
Bottom Line
Now when you know that WordPress website can be translated in different ways, all you have to do is to decide which method to chose. If you are not with WordPress yet, consider to use CMS2CMS, a fully automated website migration service, with comes with the opportunity to run Free Demo migration and observe the final results beforehand.
And what about you? Have you made your WordPress site multilingual? Did you use one of the listed methods above or maybe you have something to add? Feel free to leave your comments in the section below.