WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world. No matter your country or language, you can use WordPress to create a site that works for your audience. One thing not enough WordPress users think about is the idea of making their site multilingual. In addition to appealing to visitors from different languages, there’s also another benefit: featuring content in different languages means your site is more likely to have better SEO in those languages.
The good news is that there are plenty of great WordPress plugins that can allow you to add multilingual content to your site without much effort.
In places like Canada where two languages are spoken, offering your content in both languages will help to reach more people and appeal to a wider audience.
How To Choose The Right Translation Plugin
With the help of plugins, you can ensure that your website features all the languages you need to cover the needs of your audience.
There are automated WordPress translation plugins that allow you to add your own content in different languages and the main benefit here is the translation quality. You do have to source the translations yourself, but that way you can also be sure that they are accurate.
There are also plugins that use online translation services to translate your content. This means that you don’t have to translate one piece of content multiple times, but the downside is that the translation may not be 100% accurate.
The Best Translation Plugins For Websites
These plugins allow you to manually translate your website, so you can be sure the translations are correct. The top picks we’ve got for you include:
TranslatePress
This is a fully fledged multilingual plugin for WordPress that can work to translate your entire website. During the translation you can switch languages and the live preview will instantly change, and you can do all of this without changing the interface. You can create SEO friendly URLs for all relevant languages, and this will help your local SEO results.
WPML
This particular plugin is one of the most popular out there and it has a translation management system allowing you to translate everything on your site. You will need the multilingual CMS plan for a business website, and it allows you to connect your site to a third-party translation service provider.
Polylang
If you need more than one language translated on your website, Polylang can help. You have a very simple interface and you can add translations for all the different elements of your site. The plugin lets you choose more translations for URLs and you can add a language switcher to a website sidebar.
While plugins do exist that “automatically” translate your site into different languages, for any website representing an operating business, we would advise you to stick to manual translations. You don’t want your reputation to suffer in a particular market segment due to a poor or inaccurate translation.
