Multilingual Settings on Your WordPress Website

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If your website’s audience comes from various countries, it’s best to offer your content in two or more languages, and you should configure multilingual settings on your WordPress site to provide all your visitors with an exceptional experience.

Additionally, translating your content gives you an opportunity to reach more people through search engines and social media, which is another great benefit.

Although WordPress doesn’t have a built-in feature to help you create a multilingual site, you can use WordPress translation plugins to offer your site in two or more languages.

In this post, Mangcoding will guide you step-by-step on how to set up WordPress in two languages using the free TranslatePress plugin.

As we mentioned earlier, if you want to use two languages on the front-end of your WordPress site (the section your visitors will see), you need a translation plugin.

TranslatePress is a WordPress translation plugin available for free on WordPress.org, with a premium version that includes additional features. It allows you to translate 100% of your site’s content into one or more new languages.

What’s unique about this plugin is that it translates 100% of your content directly. Whether the content comes from the WordPress editor, plugins (like page builders), or your theme, you’ll be able to manage everything directly from the visual editor.

While you can follow this tutorial and translate WordPress into two languages using the free version, the paid version offers SEO optimization features, unlimited language support, and more add-ons.

For this example, we’ll show you how to set up your WordPress site in English and Spanish, as this is a common combination. However, you can use the same steps to translate your site into almost any language combination.

To get started, all you need to do is install and activate the free TranslatePress plugin from WordPress.org. You will be able to follow all the core steps in this tutorial using only the free version.

1. Choose the Two WordPress Languages You Want to Use

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, the first step is to choose the two languages you want to use on your site. This means you will also select the current language of your content.

For the settings, go to Settings > TranslatePress. Here, you’ll see how we’ve configured it for English (default) and Spanish (new language):

2. Set Up Automatic Translation (Optional)

If you have a lot of content, manually translating all your content into a new language from scratch can be a huge task.

To save time, TranslatePress supports automatic translation through Google Translate (free). This service will automatically generate translations for your entire site. Then, TranslatePress will store those translations locally.

Even if you use automatic translations, you can still go back and manually edit all translations, allowing you to correct/change translations if needed.

However, this step is completely optional. You can also add translations manually from the start.

If you want to set up automatic translation, go to the Automatic Translation tab. There, you can choose your preferred service and set it up.

3. Translate Your Content

Now, it’s time to:

• Translate your content (if not using automatic translation).
• Manually edit automatic translations from your chosen service.

To launch the translation editor, open a page you want to translate on the front-end of your site. Then, click the **Translate Page** option in the WordPress toolbar:

This will open the visual translation editor. You’ll see a live preview of your site on the right and a sidebar on the left where you can manage your translations.

To translate any part of your content, simply hover over it in the live preview and click the pencil icon. This will open the content in the sidebar editor, where you can add/edit the translation:

You can use the same basic approach to translate 100% of your content, whether it comes from the WordPress editor, theme, or plugin. In fact, you can even “translate” images by hovering over the image and clicking the pencil icon.

4. Set Up Your Language Switcher

To allow visitors to choose between the different language versions of your site, TranslatePress helps you add a language switcher to the front-end.

By default, TranslatePress adds this language switcher as a widget in the bottom right corner of your site. However, you can also move it to a different position or customize it according to your needs.

You can change its placement using:

• Custom menu items ( Appearance → Menus )
• A shortcode that you can add anywhere on your site (including sidebar widgets)
• PHP functions that you can add directly to your theme’s template files

To view these placement options and change other settings for your language switcher, go to Settings → TranslatePress and scroll down.

5. Optimize Both Languages for Multilingual SEO

By now, you should have versions of your content in both languages. Google will be able to index and rank both language versions, and TranslatePress will implement several multilingual SEO best practices like the hreflang tag.

However, if you want to further optimize your translations for SEO, you can purchase the premium version of TranslatePress to get access to the SEO Pack add-on.

With the SEO Pack add-on, you can also use the same simple interface from above to translate the following details:

• SEO titles and meta descriptions (as seen in Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or other SEO plugins).
• Social media information (such as titles/descriptions that appear when people share your content).
• URL slugs.

This can also help you create a multilingual XML sitemap that you can submit to Google and other search engines.

If ranking both languages on your site in Google is part of your marketing strategy, you should also translate these elements to get the best results for your translations.

Once you purchase and install the SEO Pack add-on, you will be able to translate SEO metadata and social media information using the dropdowns in the TranslatePress editor. You can also translate URL slugs using the new String Translation option in the editor.

That’s the article on Multilingual Settings on Your WordPress Website that Mangcoding is sharing. I hope this article is helpful and provides new insights for you. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to comment or send them through Email or Mangcoding’s social media.

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