WordPress has become the most popular Content Management System in the world. More than 30% of the websites on the internet run on WordPress.
With its vast community, language has been a significant barrier to attract more viewers. With single language support by WordPress, making a multilingual site is a bit of a hassle. You can either create your website in English or any other language supported by WordPress.
There are numbers of WordPress plugins which can help you make your WordPress website multilingual. All these plugins have their way of translating the site with distinct features and attributes. Out of them, let us talk about ‘Weglot,’ which I found to be the best.
What is Weglot?
Weglot is a powerful language translation tool which translates a WordPress website into more than one language. It can translate your site into a multilingual website with multiple languages in minutes without doing any code. Supporting over 110 different languages, Weglot does what it says.
Weglot is different from other translation plugins because it’s easy to use, SEO ready and compatible with almost all the themes and plugins. Like any other translation plugins, Weglot translates your site but that’s not the only thing it does. It places a language switcher on your website allowing visitors to change the content to their preferred language simply by clicking on flag icon.
The plugin doesn’t require any professional knowledge to be operated. An average user can set it up without typing any codes in about 2 minutes, and the plugin will start working like a charm.
Weglot also offers a Shopify App and Bigcommerce app.
With all these boasting about Weglot, you might be wondering what it really provides. Here are the features of Weglot which I was impressed with.
Compatibility
As I have already said, Weglot is compatible with almost all the themes and plugins available in WordPress. Weglot parses the content of your site instead of using get text function. It uses an intuitive translation API to detect content on your website and parses it for translation. This means every content on your site is translated and other WooCommerce team or Theme developers do not need to invest hours to make it right.
With this technical approach, Weglot works like a charm.
Plug and Play with No Maintenance
Weglot is easy to set up. It will take less than 2 minutes to setup and make your site multilingual. All you have to do is create your free Weglot account and install the plugin in your WordPress website.
With Weglot you don’t have to worry about breaking your websites with updates. With its API approach, users don’t need to concern about maintenance at all. Weglot does it in the background without you even knowing. This can’t be said about most of the translation plugins available today.
SEO Friendly
Being SEO friendly is one of the strongest features of this plugin. We all know how important SEO is for bloggers and e-commerce websites. Weglot automatically applies its inbuilt SEO rules that comply with Google’s Best Practices for multilingual sites. Users don’t have to worry about indexing their translated pages in Google and an additional plugin for reviewing the content. Some SEO friendly optimization that Weglot does are:
- Weglot creates a dedicated URL for each language to ensure the proper indexation of your translated content by Search Engines. Different subdirectories (mywebsite.com/fr or mywebsite.com/es for French and Spanish versions) are automatically created for translated pages.
- Hreflang tags are automatically added in the source code, to make sure Google can easily know and discover translated pages.
- Translation is done on server side, i.e., the source code is translated, and JavaScript translation isn’t done. This ensures speed of your website.
Control Over Your Content
Unlike other translation plugins, Weglot gives users full control over the content. If you want a quick translation, then Weglot can automatically translate your entire site in minutes with its machine translation. Machine translations are displayed by default, but you can opt out to never display machine translation. You need to approve or edit/replace translations provided to have them displayed.
You can create your translation rules to never translate a brand/product name etc. Or always translate something into something else. It’s up to you. You can also exclude pages or part of pages you do not want to be translated by adding the URL or CSS classes.
Collaboration Tool
By default, Weglot provides machine translation, but if you want a more refined approach, you can always go in and:
- Manually edit translation from your Weglot account. You can edit machine translation if there are any mistakes in translation.
- You can add team members or freelance translators in your Weglot account to help you in the translation work.
- You can also order professional in-house translators of Weglot to translate your site.
Not many translation plugins provide collaboration option to its users.
Great Customer Experience
Customer satisfaction doesn’t just impact the business; it also impacts team morale and retention rate. With this in mind, Weglot takes an extra step to provide a complete experience for customers. Here’s what you can get from Weglot for better customer experience.
- Email translations: Weglot makes sure that customers have a great experience while receiving payment confirmation and thank you email by translating the email into their language. It highly impacts the view of the customers towards your business/website.
- Image/video translations: You can display different images/videos to your viewers depending on each of their translated languages.
- Auto redirection: Weglot automatically redirects visitors to their language based on their browser language preference which is more reliable than IP geo-localization.
How to Setup Weglot?
Like I said earlier, installing Weglot is a piece of cake. Just follow these steps, and you are ready to go.
- Install Weglot plugin in your WordPress admin.
- Go to https://weglot.com/register-wordpress to set up an account and confirm your email.
- Choose your required package and grab the API key.
- Add your API key in Weglot plugin on WordPress and choose your original language and destination language.
- Save the settings: You should see the language button appear on your website (by default bottom right).
Price
Weglot Translate is a freemium plugin: it is free for small websites (under 2000 words) with one translation language. If you need more, you can upgrade to any of the paid plans. There are seven price plans available, mainly depending on the total number of translated words. The payment can be done on a monthly or yearly basis.
Weglot also offers a free trial period of 10 days in addition to the free plan.
Conclusion
Weglot is powerful translation tool that works better than any of the translation plugins available. Although Weglot isn’t the cheapest way to translate your WordPress site, it is the easiest and most user-friendly. Being SEO friendly is also a plus point for Weglot.