Every blog owner would like to present their blog and articles in front of as many people as possible. One of the major problem in that is distribution language.
When you start a blog, you decide on a language, and your whole site will follow the same. Your audience reach is defined based on the choice of language. That’s why most of the blog owners prefer English as it is widely accepted language with the biggest audience base.
That does not mean you should ignore the other languages. You can still serve them with the help of Weglot WordPress Plugin.
I am from India and use English as the primary language for my blogs, but I know I am missing millions of readers who like to read in Hindi. Weglot can make this happen without much extra effort from my side.
Table of Contents
Manual Approach To Translation
The manual effort to the translation of your content can become a lot of work. You have to create translated pages, translated SEO meta tags and set the different URL’s for each language correctly.
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Installing Weglot
Weglot WordPress plugin is available in WordPress repository, and you can install it directly from the WordPress Dashboard. You need an API to make use of the services provided by Weglot.
Weglot service pricing is based on what amount of translation you need. For small websites which require less than 2000 words translation, it is free. You can check their plan and activate based on your site need.
Once you activate any plan, you will get an API key which can be entered in WordPress dashboard to activate the plugin.
Content Conversion
You can select the source and target languages which you want to show on your website. I would suggest to go through the Google Analytics data and check from where you are getting the most traffic. Add the languages for those countries as your target.
Once you have the plugin all setup, you can start converting your content. You can leave everything on the plugin to convert and display or keep a final moderation, so you can check before the content goes live.
If you have people who understand the language and can edit the pages, it’s a good idea to let them take a look before publishing it.
Weglot does not depend on the WordPress get_text function to get the translated text. It parses your pages and takes the complete text for translation which means you can use any plugin or theme and it will still be able to display the translation. No plugin or themes need to support it explicitly. So no fear of breaking the site while doing any update on your site.
Display Settings
You can also change the settings for the button display on your site from WordPress Dashboard.
You can decide to show the flag and name of the languages which are supported on your site. A user can use that button and see the translated text on your site.
There are multiple ways to include this button on your site. You can add it to your WordPress Menu as a menu option, use a shortcode to display it into the post, use a widget to display it on the sidebar or HTML tag to include in page templates. By default, it will be displayed at the bottom right corner of your site, and you can choose any other method to place it according to your design.
SEO Support
The Weglot translated pages are SEO friendly and follow the Google’s advice on the multilingual setup. You will get a new URL for each page by adding a language in the URL. For example, http://example. com will have a URL http://example. com/da for the Danish Language. Similar way you will have a URL for all other languages also.
Google suggests to set up the sites this way so that they can understand the structure and correct pages can rank according to geolocation. Your all other pages should have a “rel=canonical” link back to your primary language pages to intimate Google about the main pages. This will save you from any penalty because of duplicate content.
Once the Weglot JavaScript is added to your pages, they will be converted and displayed in user-selected language.
You also have an option to add an automatic redirect based on language preference in the user browser. It means that your user doesn’t even have to use the button, it will be translated and displayed to your user automatically.
Weglot also has integration with other CMS like Drupal, Shopify, Wix, Jimdo, BigCommerce, etc. So if you are using any of those CMS, you can still use this service.
Conclusion
Weglot is a handy WordPress plugin which helps in setting multi-lingual site without many efforts. Once your site is set up, your pages will rank in another language to bring more traffic to your site. This is an excellent way to get new readers or increase the presence over the internet.
