Worked with TranslatePress for a guest post. You can read the full article here

Bonjour, Hola, Guten tag, Bună ziua…

If you are wondering, I just said Hello in four different languages. We feel more comfortable and natural with our mother tongue, right? This is what a customer also feels when they see a website or an online store in their language.

In fact, 76% of users prefer to read product information in their native languages. That’s why big eCommerce stores are concentrating more and more on delivering the product information in the user’s native language. 

Not only eCommerce stores, even the search giant Google is trying very hard to provide the search engine results in the user’s local language and also to solve local intent searches as more than 50% of all queries on Google are in languages other than English. 

What the above stats help us understand is making our website multilingual increases not only the user satisfaction but also increases the website traffic. If you are skeptical, I have a few examples in the next section to back up my point. Let’s dive in…

How Translating Websites and Products Helped Big Brands Succeed 

Example 1: We all know Airbnb is revolutionizing the hospitality industry in more than 200 countries by providing a personal touch to each and every interaction. In order to provide a more authentic experience to their users, AirBnB offers its website and application in 62 languages. They even manage to translate the user-generated content like reviews to deliver a more authentic experience. 

Example 2: ASOS – an eCommerce platform that has seen 149% growth in the last five years solely through digital sales. They don’t even have a single physical store. The important reason for their massive success is they translated their website and product description into seven different languages and allows users to see the website/product in their preferred language and pay with the currency the user wants.

There are plenty of examples to show you how translating a website has helped brands succeed. Even studies show that “65% of multinational enterprises believe localization is either important or very important for achieving higher company revenues.” Translating your website in the user’s native language is the first step to localization. 

Ok, you might understand the need for translation and localization by now. Another question that might come to your mind is a big enterprise like AirBnB that has revenue in millions can afford to translate their website and app in 62 languages. Can a small brand or an upcoming online store afford to translate a website into different languages?

Well, luckily, we have TranslatePress, an intuitive WordPress plugin that can help you translate and manage multilingual websites fast and easy.

TranslatePress does all the heavy lifting for you and lets you run a multilingual website in no time. Let’s see how using it you can translate all your website, product description, and even the forms and image alt-texts to deliver an enhanced user experience.

How To Translate WordPress Website

One of the easiest ways to translate a WordPress website is by using a dedicated multilingual plugin. TranslatePress integrates well into your website and lets you translate each and every section of your website without disturbing your website’s looks and other functionalities. 

Some of the Key features of TranslatePress are:

• User-friendly visual interface for translating content.
• Translate everything you see on your site, including posts, pages, and contact forms.
• Automatic translation support using Google Translate and DeepL.
• You can even choose a different image for each language. 
• Supports WooCommerce, custom post types, complex themes, and page builders.
• Customizable Language Switcher.
• SEO friendly

TranslatePress comes in both a free and a premium version. You can see all the details on the TranslatePress features page. 

Installing TranslatePress

Like all other WordPress plugins, you can install TranslatePress from your WordPress dashboard’s “Add New” plugin section. Or you can download the plugin from WordPress.org and upload the zip file to your WordPress site. 

Set Your Language

Adding a new language to your website is very simple. Under the Settings menu, click on TranslatePress and you’ll be taken to the plugin settings page. The default language is the original language of your content, for we’ll keep it in English.

Under the All Languages section is where you can add the extra languages you want. TranslatePress supports more than 220 languages, which is more than enough for you to reach almost all audiences around the world. Select a language from the dropdown menu and click the “Add” button. I am going to select French for this tutorial. That’s all, the language is now added to your website. The language code and the slug code are shown near the selected language to make your job simple. 

Language Switcher

A WordPress language switcher allows users to easily switch between all the different languages your website offers, with a click of a button. This language switcher is added automatically by TranslatePress itself. You can change the location of the floating window to bottom right/left, top right/left. Plus, you can also choose whether you want to show the language with the flag or just the label. 

To make the language switcher even more accessible to the audience, you can add it to the menu by going to Appearance>Menus and add the languages you want. 

Automatic Translation

The automatic translation feature in TranslatePress helps you automatically translate the words in the language you want with the help of Google TranslatePress and DeepL, and later, you can fine-tune the words and make the reading even more fluid in the particular language. If you are a perfectionist, you can manually add each and every text. Since TranslatePress offers you a great visual frontend editor, you can edit the texts easily and that’s what we’re going to see next. 

Translating your entire website

There are two ways to access the TranslatePress editor tool. Either you can go to the TranslatePress settings page in the dashboard and select the Translate Site tab. You will be automatically directed to your website’s homepage, from there you can navigate to the page you want and start editing it.

The second option is far simpler. Once you log in to your WordPress website, go to the webpage you want to edit. At the top bar, you can see the TranslatePress option, click it and start translating the page. 

On the sidebar, you can see all the controls related to TranslatePress. The first dropdown option shows the current language, and from the second dropdown, you can select the texts & other attributes on the page and start translating. To make the translation process even simpler, TranslatePress allows you to directly select the text you want by clicking the pencil icon near the text on the page. Now I am going to translate the word “Multilingual Website” to French.

Now that we’ve selected the language to French and the word we want to translate, let’s see how to translate the word. Once you have selected a word, you can see a couple of text boxes on the sidebar showing the languages. In our case, we can see From English to French. 

The selected text will be shown on the English textbox .i.e., “Multilingual website.” Enter the French word in the “To French” text box. In our case, the word will be “Site Web Multilingue”. Hit the save button and you can see the result in real time on the live editor. 

Like this, you can translate each and every text on the page and even the button texts. Once TranslatePress gets used to some words, it automatically gives you suggestions to make your job easier, and similar words will be translated automatically to save your time. Below you can see the completely translated webpage. 

Enhance Multilingual SEO

Now that we’ve seen how to translate your website content and deliver a comfortable experience to the users, let’s look into how to make sure your translated content will rank in multiple languages.

You can enhance your multilingual website SEO with TranslatePress by making sure you translate the most important SEO elements on each page.

How to use TranslatePress SEO features

TranslatePress is compatible with almost all famous/major SEO tools. For this tutorial, I am going to use the popular Yoast plugin. 

Once you have installed and configured the Yoast plugin, it allows you to set the keyword for the website and meta description for that particular page. I’ve already set the page and gave a meta description for the page.

Just like translating the page, go to the page which you want to edit. Click the Translate page option at the top. On the TranslatePress sidebar, you can not only select the texts that are visible but also can edit the hidden important texts. Under the meta information, you can see the page title and page description. As I have used Yoast in English, the page title and the description will be English. 

Select the page title from the meta description and change the name to the French version. As I have already translated the word “Multilingual website,” the TranslatePress smartly understands it and shows the corresponding French word in the suggestion. Simply click it, and the French word will be applied to the page title. For the meta description, select it and enter the French words like we did before, and save it. Your website’s French meta description and page title is ready now.

Translate Image Alt Tags

Alt tags/texts are one of the important criteria in SEO. TranslatePress allows you to translate the alt text of each image. For that, simply click to select a certain image or select it from the translation editor dropdown. All images are grouped under the images category list to make it easier for you.

Select the image you want, and the corresponding alt and image source attribute will be shown. All you have to do is to enter the translation for that image alt text and hit the save button.

Some sites want to show a different image for different languages; TranslatePress allows you to do that as well by simply selecting the image you want to change and adding the replacing image.

Creating a Multilingual Sitemap with TranslatePress

73% of 1.2 million SERPs had localized features on them. Hence, having an XML sitemap in the local language will help you get a better rank on the search engine result page (SERP).

TranslatePress’s SEO addon helps you automatically create a multilingual sitemap by extending the sitemap created by all the popular SEO plugins, like:.

• Yoast SEO
• Rank Math
• SEOPress
• All in One SEO Pack

The multilingual sitemap divides your site up by language and helps the search engines to easily discover your website in the languages you offer. 

Start Growing Multilingual Traffic Today

Translating your WordPress website is an excellent way to increase traffic and boost conversions. If you’re running an online store or membership site, making it multi-language can lead to more revenue.

TranslatePress lets you translate everything you see, directly from the front-end, using an intuitive visual translation interface. It also works out of the box with any theme or plugin, including page builders, like Elementor. 

Using its SEO pack add-on your website will get the needed SEO boost and increase the chances of ranking in multiple languages. To speed things up you can also opt for its automatic translation feature and simply modify anything that sounds off.

You can get started with the free version from WordPress.org to translate your site into one new language and access all of the language switcher settings.

Then, upgrade to the premium version to be able to add unlimited languages, enhanced multilingual SEO, and access other useful features like:

• DeepL support for automatic translation.
• Automatically redirecting users to their preferred languages.
• Translator accounts.
• Showing separate menus based on a user’s language (rather than just translating the same set of menu items).