- PPF Points
- 2,888
Making a WordPress site multilingual? Oh man, that’s one of those things you think will be a breeze—just add some flags and poof, everyone’s happy. Reality check: it’s a bit of a rabbit hole. I’ve wrangled a bunch of international sites, and trust me, adding language options is like 20% of the battle. The rest? Making sure people actually feel like you built the thing for them, not just running it through Google Translate and calling it a day.
WordPress helps, yeah, but it’s got its own bag of tricks. Picking a multilingual plugin is basically step one, and honestly, it’s make-or-break territory. WPML gets a lot of love from folks who want the whole shebang—translating posts, pages, products, grandma’s apple pie recipe, you name it. But it’s kind of a resource hog, so don’t cheap out on hosting or your site will crawl. If you’re a minimalist (or just broke), Polylang’s solid and lightweight, as long as you don’t mind tweaking stuff yourself. And there’s TranslatePress, which lets you translate right on the site—super intuitive, even if you aren’t a tech wizard.
Then, you gotta decide how you want your languages to show up—directories, subdomains, or totally different domains. Me? I lean toward subdirectories (like example.com/fr/), because Google plays nicer with them and it keeps things tidy. But some folks are obsessed with subdomains for branding. Both roads get you there, but make sure you pick early or you’ll be stuck cleaning up later.
The real migraine, though, is SEO and content duplication. Google’s not a fan of “copy-paste, just in Spanish,” so you better set up those hreflang tags, match meta descriptions per language, and double-check your sitemaps. A lot of plugins claim they handle this—sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Always, always audit. Learned that the hard way.
I should mention—translating media and menus? Weirdly annoying. Got text baked into your images? You’ll need new ones. Multilingual menus gotta be built out in each language… pretty hands-on, honestly. People forget this and their sites end up feeling half-assed.
Oh, and performance: these plugins can tank your load times if you’re not careful. So mix in some caching, use a CDN, grab decent hosting. Don’t try to run WPML on a $5-a-month server in someone’s basement.
End of the day, making your site actually feel multilingual (not just technically bilingual or whatever) is about thinking like your users. Tech is half the game. The other half? Figuring out what the people on the other side of the world actually want and need.
So, honestly—how do you pick your languages? And if you’ve already been through this madness, what pain points tapped out your patience?
WordPress helps, yeah, but it’s got its own bag of tricks. Picking a multilingual plugin is basically step one, and honestly, it’s make-or-break territory. WPML gets a lot of love from folks who want the whole shebang—translating posts, pages, products, grandma’s apple pie recipe, you name it. But it’s kind of a resource hog, so don’t cheap out on hosting or your site will crawl. If you’re a minimalist (or just broke), Polylang’s solid and lightweight, as long as you don’t mind tweaking stuff yourself. And there’s TranslatePress, which lets you translate right on the site—super intuitive, even if you aren’t a tech wizard.
Then, you gotta decide how you want your languages to show up—directories, subdomains, or totally different domains. Me? I lean toward subdirectories (like example.com/fr/), because Google plays nicer with them and it keeps things tidy. But some folks are obsessed with subdomains for branding. Both roads get you there, but make sure you pick early or you’ll be stuck cleaning up later.
The real migraine, though, is SEO and content duplication. Google’s not a fan of “copy-paste, just in Spanish,” so you better set up those hreflang tags, match meta descriptions per language, and double-check your sitemaps. A lot of plugins claim they handle this—sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Always, always audit. Learned that the hard way.
I should mention—translating media and menus? Weirdly annoying. Got text baked into your images? You’ll need new ones. Multilingual menus gotta be built out in each language… pretty hands-on, honestly. People forget this and their sites end up feeling half-assed.
Oh, and performance: these plugins can tank your load times if you’re not careful. So mix in some caching, use a CDN, grab decent hosting. Don’t try to run WPML on a $5-a-month server in someone’s basement.
End of the day, making your site actually feel multilingual (not just technically bilingual or whatever) is about thinking like your users. Tech is half the game. The other half? Figuring out what the people on the other side of the world actually want and need.
So, honestly—how do you pick your languages? And if you’ve already been through this madness, what pain points tapped out your patience?
