10 Best WordPress Multilingual Plugins for Your Website
No matter the scale, industry or niche your website operates in, chances are that you will attract an international audience over time. According to statistics, over 26% of the web is powered solely through WordPress CMS.
This makes it an obvious choice for blogs, ecommerce and company sites, especially if you already have stakeholders abroad. However, coming to grips with translation and localization can often be difficult. With that in mind, let’s take a look at several multilingual WordPress plugins which can help you retrofit your content for overseas markets with ease and precision.
The WordPress Multilingual Plugin is considered by many to be the best tool in the multilingual arena. It allows for versatile management of numerous languages through different sub-domains and domains. This means that your content can be gated by language-specific domain names which will allow for easier search engine ranking.
Similarly, WPML allows for both automatic and manual translation options. You can have your content synced with an online cloud translation algorithm or go through the process manually according to your needs. WPML is one of the most diverse and premium themes enabled WordPress plugins out there, making it a perfect choice for individuals and firms alike.
Despite its complex name, QTranslate X is a very slick and user-friendly multilingual content editor and plugin. It allows you to create localized content based on your native language in very interesting ways.
For example, QTranslate X takes even the date formats and URL optimization into consideration when translating content into another language. This makes the plugin very useful for beginners, especially with its extensive list of integrated plugins.
In terms of automatic translation plugins, WeGlot comes very close to perfection. The plugin is capable of translating and optimizing content in 60 different languages. It can automatically detect all of the content on your website, including Meta data and SERP tags.
WeGlot is a great option for content managers and administrators in search of automation without deep custom translation options. However, the plugin does sport a premium version which can be used in tandem with professional translators from The Word Point or similar outsourcing platform.
Not every plugin has to be premium in size and features – and that’s okay. Babble comes from a small indie development team and aims to fill the gap between bloggers and their audience. There are over 50,000 free WordPress plugins on the market currently, all of which offer their own set of pros and cons. Babble is much faster and easier to load than most feature-rich plugins for WordPress due to its lack of customization options.
What Babble does well is side-by-side translation. This means that you can use its intuitive interface to manually translate any content on your site and contact the development team at any given moment while doing so. That way, you will never be left on your own in terms of compatibility issues or translation scripting inside Babble’s interface.
Despite its name, Google Language Translator is not under active development by Google. Instead, it features their translation algorithms and integrates with Google tools seamlessly. This allows for over 80 languages to be featured on your website.
Google Language Translator can be inserted into WordPress without compatibility issues into any part of your website. Another good thing about this plugin is its social engineering aspect in terms of Google being present on your website. That way, your visitors will place more faith into your content and services, seeing that you opt to use a prolific search engine like Google in your website.
Lingotek is not a standalone multilingual plugin for WordPress. Instead, it operates based on a cloud network of related databases which coincide with its translation algorithms. This means that it is community driven and offers more curated automation options. According to statistics, over 79 million posts are created through WordPress on a monthly basis.
Any content too complex for machine translation goes through Lingotek and its database of existing translations for those specific content elements. Lingotek servers offer dozens upon dozens of languages will full support and ongoing development underway. Anything from your site’s UI, SEO, tags and categories can be translated using Lingotek.
Multisite features are only some of the positives that WordPress CMS brings to the table. However, using them manually without site maintenance knowledge can be troublesome, especially with localization involved. Multilingual Press is a translation plugin that relies on multisite language separation.
This means that every language present on your site will be coupled with its own domain extension according to its name. It’s quite easy and intuitive to manage all of your languages from a single interface screen inside Multilingual Press. If you disable the plugin at any moment, all of your site domains will still exist and be accessible until you explicitly decide otherwise.
If you are looking for a plugin package which will allow you to maintain your SEO and localization all in one, look no further than WPGlobus. This plugin comes equipped with Yoast SEO integration apart from its language translation capabilities. However it is worth noting that WPGlobus is not an automatic translation tool.
This means that you will have to translate your content manually or hire a third-party to do it for you. What it does allow however is very intuitive and user-friendly management of numerous translation aspects of your website. WPGlobus is a content management and writing plugin above all else which makes it perfect for large companies and teams of translators.
There is no such thing as a niche language when it comes to Translate Press. The plugin comes equipped with support for over 200 languages and dialects, including their SEO optimization.
Translate Press is built with page-by-page translation in mind, meaning that it is able to localize entire pages of content at once. This makes it perfect for large blogs and ecommerce sites with endless product lists. However, the SEO optimization is gated off in the free version of Translate Press, meaning that you will have to commit to the premium package if you want its full features list.
Lastly, Bogo is a welcome surprise for people who want simplicity and quality in their WordPress plugins. Bogo is a great tool for building multilingual sites on single WordPress installation websites. Bogo stands out however due to a lack of premium WordPress theme support and overall lack of advanced features.
It allows for parallel content creation in numerous languages which can then be published at the same time. It is a great plugin for beginner WordPress users and those who don’t want a dozen active features on their site at once. Bogo is compatible with a plethora of plugins and takes up a fraction of the bandwidth most premium WordPress plugins do.
In Conclusion
Test several tools out and see which ones suit your content style and volume the best. Choosing the right multilingual plugin for your site comes down to your budget and whether or not you have in-house translators available.
Automatic plugins are a great alternative to hiring third-party translators but often result in varying levels of quality. Similarly, translators will do a good job with your content but will also charge for their expertise and time investment. Gauge your needs and expectations before settling for the right plugin for your WordPress site.
