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There are many ways to make a website in multiple languages.
The most common way is to use a translation plugin or service.
These services will automatically translate your website into the desired language.
Another way is to manually create separate versions of your website in each language.
This requires more work, but gives you more control over the content and design of your site.
If you are looking to start out from scratch, or already have a WordPress website, or even a Shopify or Wix webiste, you can easily create a website in multiple languages.
Keep readint to learn more about how to create a multilingual site and reach a worldwide audience.
There are many factors to consider when choosing a domain name, hosting service and CDN, specially when you are aiming towards an International SEO strategy.
The domain name is the address of your website, and it is important to choose a name that is easy to remember and spell.
When it comes to websites that are willing to be visited internationally, then it is recommended to select a .com website, rather than those website names that are known as ccTLD, which are the .de, .com.mx, .fr, .nl and so on.
The reason of choosing a .com is because it is a more generic ending, and visitors from all around the world can easily feel identified, as if you have a .de website, it would be rare that people from latin america visit those sites commonly
Unless you are aiming to grow a business like Amazon, that have the team and resources to manage multiple domains, then a generic .com is a great way to start your multi language site.
Namecheap is one popular domain name provider that has great deals and offers.
The hosting service provides the infrastructure for your website, and it is important to choose a reliable provider that can offer good uptime and support.
Cloudways and Vultr are great hostings for websites that are aiming to have visitors from all around the world.
In the past it was a common practice to choose a hosting that it was close to your readers and visitors, but as there are better and better technologies such as CDNs, it is not a great decision factor anymore for web pages in several language versions.
The CDN helps to deliver your content to visitors around the world, and it is important to choose a provider with a good network.
One of the most popular and free CDN is Cloudflare, which will help your professional website to reach audiences worldwide and that your site has a great speed performance.
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that enables you to create a website or blog from scratch, or to improve an existing website.
WordPress is open source software released under the GPL.
There are two ways to create a WordPress website: by installing the WordPress software on your own web server, or by signing up for a web hosting account that includes WordPress installation.
Hostings like Vultr and Cloudways have easy to install WordPress buttons that can help you to start to build a multilingual website right away.
Most of the best free WordPress themes and paid version are already compatible with the most popular WordPress website multilingual plugins, so there is actually not so much to worry if they will work in conjunction.
Elementor and Divi are two of the most popular WordPress website builders that can help to create astonishing websites.
Elementor and in combination with Envato Elements plugins, are really helpful tools to use WordPress templates that speed up the web design, and that are a great advantage for beginners or even experienced designers who want to save time on creating the web content.
As well, Elementor and Divi are plugins that work in compatibility with the best WordPress multilingual plugins.
nstalling a multilingual website plugin is a great way to make your site accessible to a wider audience.
There are many plugins available that can help you translate your site into multiple languages, so be sure to choose one that will work well for your needs.
WPML is the best WordPress plugin for content sites, as it helps to set the primary languages and add as many additional languages as you desire, plus it helps to use DeepL as the automatic machine translation for your multilingual content.
Another plugin with translation services is Weglot, which it can be catalogued as the best for e-commerce sites as it doesn’t interfer in the website performance, plus it can be used for Wix multilingual websites in case that you are not aiming to use WordPress.
Translatepress has a free version of its plugin, that can help out to set the default language, plus one more, which is a really great option if you have a small website with only one homepage, contact page, solution pages and about page.
Conveythis is a more recent plugin with similar characteristics as Weglot, since it offers an automation translation service that can help to have a multi language website in just a matter of minutes.
There are some other plugins available to install for free like Gtranslate which uses services like Google translate, that the translation itself might not be the best, but it certainly does the work to have the languages you need.
All of those plugins can be found in the WordPress Plugins dashboards, besides WPML, which it can be downloaded once you acquire its license on their page.
Once you have installed the plugin, you can start adding content in multiple languages and reach a larger audience with your website.
Regardless of the multilingual plugin that you have chosen, the next step to create a multi language website is to set out one language as your base.
Plugins like WPML doesn’t have a limit on the additional languages that you want to add, so you can select a language that you will require as an additional.
But it certainly will add more information to your database making it bigger, so when we compare WPML vs Weglot, in this case Weglot has the advantage of not getting into your database and not growing in size, making your site lighter.
Nevertheless, Weglot is more limited in the amount of added languages, so you will require a better plan in case that you want more languages on your site.
When creating a multi language website with WordPress is important to take into consideration the native language of your users to choose strategically those that will fulfill their needs.
A website with many languages give the opportunity to the user for language selection and switch between languages that they feel more comfortable to read on.
As well, most of the popular translation plugins have a language switcher option to add convenience to set the language that is desired by the visitor.
They are easy to set up an mainly you can find the language switcher in the bottom-right corner for the case of Weglot, or it can be moved to be in the main menu or above the main menu.
Some websites prefer to use flags, while others prefer to just add the language name in text.
In the case of arabic language, the switcher can also help to have the right-to-left language to your website, making it readable for arab reading users.
If you want to reach a global audience, it’s important to translate your content into different languages.
You can either do this manually or use automatic translation tools powered by artificial intelligence.
Both have their pros and cons, but ultimately it’s up to you to decide which method is best for your needs.
The multilingual dashboards of the plugins will vary, but they will give you the option to do the corrections of the automatic translation.
If you speak multiple languages, then you can do the corrections by your own, but in case that you have a team of translators, or prefer to hire a translation service, the plugins are ready to support outside translation.
As automatic translation is improving with the use of Artificial Intelligence, the need of corrections is being reduced and readers can read content in their preferred language as if it was manually checked by a native.
So now that you have a mutiple language WordPress site, it is time that you start promoting it internationally.
As you have your content in several language options, readers can access your content directly on the language they want.
One of the best ways to promote this type of website is with the use of search engines.
As Google is one of the most used search engines world wide, it is crucial for a website to be in multiple languages so that it has more opportunities to gain traffic from international isitors.
Instead of creating multiple versions of your site, having one piece of content from a base website will be easier to manage and to try to rank in search engines.
All your link building efforts will remain in just one site, so there is no need to have different versions of it and promote each.
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