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How to create an international website

If you want to know how to create an international website, it is really easy to develop it to be in foreign markets. 

There are more advantages than disadvantages of having an international website.

Keep reading to learn what steps can help you to gain international presence.

How to create an international website
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Table of Contents

1. Select your Online Platform.

If you have not yet a online website, then you can start from scratch and decide to move on forward from this point.

There are multiple platforms that help to create a website for business, but certainly WordPress has been one of the most populat and common platform to create websites.

We’ve all heard about this tool, so we certainly couldn’t avoid the opportunity to give you a tutorial on how to make a website with WordPress.

With just a couple of steps you will have your project up and running, and you will notice that it is simpler than it seems.

WordPress is not the only one, but it does have helped thousands of online webmaster and businesses to gain international traffic.

Some other popular platforms to create international websites are also Shopify, Wix, Weebly, Joomla, Bigcommerce and more others.

To decide which is the best plaftform for your international website depends exactly on what are your needs. If you are going to build only a corporate information website, then considering just WordPress is a great idea, but if you want to further develop an online store, you could also analyze platforms such as Shopify or Bigcommerce.

For different platforms you will or not need some hosting platform, bringing us to decide which is the best hosting platform.

Working on website design

Step 2: Choose a fast and stable hosting for an international website.

Under the intention of creating an international website with WordPress you will need to find the right web hosting provider, and the points to consider that can help you make this decision correctly are the following:

  1. What you will need. This is where the resources the website will allocate, the plan you have for the next year and how much you expect it to grow come into play.
  2. Uptime. The essential thing is that you go for a stable web hosting that is available 365 days a year. 24 hours a day. 
  3. Their customer service. In case you have any problem with your website, or it doesn’t work at all, the customer service should assist you quickly and help you to solve the situation. 
  4. Easy to use. A large number of website owners do not have the necessary experience in programming, so the control panel should be very simple and intuitive. 
  5. The relationship between quality and price. We all know that in any project taking care of the budget is something important, so do not pay more than you need. Or for something that does not meet your needs. 

VPS Hosting has become a realiable, high performance and low cost option to create an international website.

Cloudways and Vultr are some hosting services that can help you to grow internationally.

 
Get Vultr $100 Credit

Step 3: Choose a domain name for an international website and language structure.

In this step you should keep in mind that the domain name will be the representative of your brand in general, so it is always recommended to think it through.

Think about what the sites you already know have in common… exactly, a short and unique name that is easy to spell and remember.

In some cases, a domain name that is difficult to remember, or spell, can drive your visitors away. Besides, once you are satisfied with the one you found, you will have to verify that it is available and register it.

On the one hand, we have ccTLD, which is considered to still make some sense for common languages starting from a country where that language is spoken, such as Russia, Israel, and any of the Scandinavian countries. Or in Latin America with Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, among others. This is a country specific approach, therefore it is not highly recommended if the business wants to have a global approach with only one domain name.

Considering a second possibility is Subdomain, which for any purpose is never to have been on the list of what is recommended for SEO since its disadvantages will outweigh its advantages. Their strong point is the creation of instances of specific countries or languages in the direction of users. This approach divides the power of a website according to its subdomain and the languages that are built towards the subdomain that was created.

This is where we find the Subdirectories or Subfolders. From an implementation perspective, they are the easiest to use since they are just another folder on the site. These have the ability to inherit all the branding and ranking value that the root domain has. The subfolder helps to have the content under a domain name that can have the endind as “.com” and the linkjuice of some backlinks will remain under the main international domain name.

Step 4: Install WordPress

woman asian software

The WordPress installation process is usually done in just a couple of clicks, so creating a website for your business with this tool is really simple.

All you need to do is go to the WordPress website and download the tool for free. Note that to start using it you will need to complete a registration form that will give you your username and password to carry out your project safely.

Among the information you may be asked to make a website in WordPress is the URL of your domain already registered, the language in which you want the tool to be, the username and password you will use, the administrator’s email, the title of your website and the slogan of the same.

Step 5. Conduct international keyword research

Doing a keyword search is an important part to start knowing which keywords are successful in a region, but in all the places where you expect to position yourself. 

What we mean by this is that you should know that just because a word has a high search rate in Spain does not mean that the same should happen in Mexico. They may be similar, and this is where the way in which that specific public expresses itself comes in.

Search intent might be different according to the country.

Keywords should always be seen as the foundation of SEO. In case there is no one searching for what you are writing about then you will not get any traffic from Google, no matter how hard you try.

When you talk about researching international keywords you are referring to knowing which set of words, redundantly, are the most searched for worldwide. Those that match users from any country, and know how you can include them in your content.

On the other hand, in many cases, as a tip for International SEO, it is also important to know which keywords work and which do not depending on the country in which you want your content to be positioned. Since the way to put together a query in Mexico may not be the same in Venezuela.

Step 6. Use a multilingual plugin such as WPML or Weglot

Surfing on websites

Among another important factor to create an international website is to use the best translation WordPress plugin.

It is important to highlight the use of multilingual plugins because we do not always want to reach audiences who speak the same language, and carry out translations manually can be exhaustive apart from the fact that it would require a greater investment to pay the right professionals.

What multilingual plugins do within International SEO is to take the content that is already done in one language and translate it into the one that is requested. Of course, each of them will work differently and, depending on the project, you can take more or less advantage of them.

On the one hand, what WPML will do is create a duplicate version of each page or post in a new language, save it as a normal WordPress post and then link to it. It will be up to you to make sure that all the new content in each of these posts is translated correctly.

On the other hand, Weglot is known for detecting all the content from the original web page, passing it to a translation API and thus replacing the original content with the translations that have been made. No additional element is created in the WordPress back-end.

Try Weglot Free
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Step 7. Create multilingual content tailored to the target country

Surfing on websites

At this point, perhaps it is superfluous to tell you that the population of different countries lives different realities.

This means that their needs, or interests, also vary, a point that you can check with the topics they consult most frequently in search engines.

Focus your content marketing efforts on really understanding the localization of your website.

Taking inspiration from the previous point, one of the most important tips within the International SEO is the creation of multilingual content, and it is important to remember that what you are trying to do is precisely to gain more traffic to your website with users from all over the world.

Ideal customers will be much more attracted to content that has been written in their native language. Apart from the fact that it is an opportunity to transmit the information to them better, retaining it for longer, and increasing the probability that they will share it with other users who have the same interest.

And within this we can talk about the automatic translations that browsers do nowadays. It should be known that this is not one hundred percent effective, and that sometimes parts of the website will remain in the original language, or the context of the sentence will not be understood correctly.

Therefore, if you want to do International SEO the best thing to do is to prepare your website with multilingual content always thinking about the target country you want to reach. Sometimes a simple idiom, or the way you write a sentence, can make the difference.

Step 8: Use CDN Cloudflare

Cloudflare-logo

Cloudflare is one of the most popular CDN available to be used for WordPress.

Since it is a free CDN, Cloudflare is easy to access.

Installing Cloudflare as a CDN just require to set the DNS hosting in Cloudflare servers. A CDN such as Cloudflare can help websites to reach international users by delivering the information faster thanks to their network.

If you want to offer international users a fast website, then a CDN is a required tool.

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