Swedish businesses often need multilingual sites. Unfortunately, multilingual support is still missing in WordPress core. Therefore, it is necessary to find your way in the jungle of language support plugins.
Anyone operating in multiple markets needs to be able to present their business in multiple languages. It is a strong recommendation to translate the online store into several different language variants – one Swedish and one English is not enough to sell to Norway, for example.
One of WordPress’ biggest drawbacks is that the platform lacks multilingual support in the core. Developing multilingual support is on the community’s to-do list, but since the main players developing the WordPress core are American, there is a lack of commitment to the issue.
– There is a discussion about building it into core, but players like Automattic and 10up who contribute most to core development are American. Then there is a backward compatibility policy that makes it difficult,” says Jimmy Rosén, CEO of Angry Creative.
Niklas Högefjord at Krokedil sees that there are other ways forward for better language support:
– “Even if WordPress doesn’t come with built-in multilingual support in the future, I still think we should work to develop a standard or best practice for how to handle it. In this way, developers of multilingual products would be able to handle it in a similar way, which reduces the risk of compatibility problems,” he says.
A common solution for Wordpress is to make one installation for each language version. Angry Creative then uses the MultilingualPress plugin to provide a single administration interface for all language variants. In addition, the plugin supports the possibility of having different top-level domains for the different language variants, such as sajt.se; sajt.de and sajt.co.uk. MultilingualPress is available in both a free and a pro version for $99 a year.
Another rising star is Polylang, which also supports WooCommerce. With Polylang, you write posts and categorize as usual, then decide which language variant the post belongs to. You can use one top-level domain or subdomain per language. Polylang has over 200,000 active installations. For Polylang, the Lingotek Translation plugin allows you to connect with professional translators for smooth translations.
WPML has been a popular plugin for multilingual support, but too many bugs and issues have caused developers to abandon WPML. The sheer amount of features in WPML has created problems with bugs and compatibility issues with other plugins.
-“WPML has a lot of quality issues, and has had problems with the cohesion of the product for a long time,” says Jimmy Rosén, CEO of Angry Creative.
Creating a multilingual site is also about choosing the right top-level domains and a sensible URL structure. Here you have to take into account both the users and Google’s requirements.
Google only uses the content of a site to identify the language. At the same time, Google recommends that site owners use a URL for each individual language to make it clear to the visitor.
There are several ways to distinguish language variants with a top-level domain, subdomain or in the URL structure:
example.se
se.example.com
example.com/se/
Obviously, getting country domains for each language variant costs money and involves some administrative work. But at the same time, using local TLDs is an important signal to both Google and visitors.
It is also important to use professional translators. Strange translations can lower your credibility.