Thinking about multilingual website? Read why it's worth to translate your site into other languages!

Introduction 

There are more than 6,500 spoken languages in the world today and the most popular ones are English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic. If you have a website and want to reach more recipients then you need to consider translating it into multiple languages. According to various sources such as CSA Research, monolingual websites fail to reach even up to 25% of their potential reader base. Without any further ado, let's get into the topic.

Gutenberg vs. multilingual sites​

The most important thing is that you don't need to build multiple websites, one for each language. You can simply have multiple languages in just one WordPress site. Isn't that great? In 2019 we welcomed a new Wordpress editor called Gutenberg. Building a website using Gutenberg is very easy because you build your site visually by using elements called blocks. If you want to add more languages, you simply install one of the many translation plugins. The most popular one is WordPress Multilingual Plugin. WPML can handle needs of any website, whether it's a company website or a blog and will successfully translate content into more than 40 languages. Apart from WPML, there is a bunch of other easy in use plugins, such as Polylang, GTranslate, Weglot Translate and Babble.

What about Joomla?

Joomla! also allows you to easily create a multilingual website, without having to install any third party extension. Simply follow one of many available tutorials and you will have a multilingual site in no time! You can find many tutorials about creating multilingual Joomla site, including official Joomla Docs tutorial. If you still need assistance you can always reach out to our Professional Services department.

Multilingual SEO​​

Since the launch of BERT, latest search algorithm, Google understands your website's content better than ever. That's why your content needs to be readable, clear and of the best quality. The same applies to multilingual websites. If your website is poorly translated, more keywords won't do the trick anymore.

The most important SEO tips for multilingual websites:

• translate not only the content, but also adapt dates, numbers and prices to the local language,
• add hyperlinks to other language versions of your website,
• avoid automatic redirections based on the user's perceived language,
• use different URLs for different language versions,
• translate all content, not only some parts of it.

Going multilingual is always a good idea

Whether you consider translation of your website to one, two or ten languages, it's always a good idea. Internet has a worldwide reach and not everyone understands English. More languages mean more customers and more customers = higher conversion. If you want to reach different markets around the world, translating of your content is necessary. Don't waste your time and translate your website today!