WordPress is used by millions of websites around the world in languages other than English. You can create a website using WordPress in any language that you want.
Unfortunately, WordPress does not support multilingual websites by default. There are a number of powerful WordPress translation plugins that make adding multilingual content easy.
We’ll discuss here the best translation plugins for WordPress that help you build multilingual websites. We will examine their features, pros, and cons so that you can select the best option for your website.
Selecting the best multilingual WordPress translation plugin
Most beginners don’t know that WordPress can be installed in your own language and used in any language.
these plugins allow you to create bilingual or multilingual websites. You can even allow your users to translate your content using Google Translate.
While there are many translation plugins available for WordPress, they can be classified into two broad categories.
- Multilingual WordPress plugins
- Automated WordPress translations
Multilingual plugins allow you to manually add content to your website in different languages. The main advantage of using these plugins is that your translations will be better than if you were to use a machine-generated translation tool.
Second, there are WordPress translation plugins that use online translation services to translate your content. These plugins don’t require you to write content in multiple languages, but their quality of translation is lower than it could be.
Therefore, let’s check out the best multilingual and automated WordPress translation plugins.
The Best Multilingual WordPress Plugins
Unlike automated translation WordPress plugins, these multilingual plugins provide the option of manually translating content, theme, plugins, and more.
Here are the best WordPress multilingual plugins that will help you easily translate your entire site.
1. ConveyThis
If there is one truly convenient way to translate your website, it must be through ConveyThis!
It is the most translated language plugin in the WordPress directory (over 38 language contrubutions) and is growing fast. ConveyThis makes it very simple to integrate into WP website and activate as many as 100+ languages.
ConveyThis uses automatic machine translation to translate your entire site, and adds a language switcher button. So within the first couple of minutes, you’ll already have a working, SEO-friendly multilingual site.
It comes with both free and paid plan. Free plan that lets you translate up to 2,500 words into one language, the paid plans use SaaS-style billing, which means you’ll need to continue to pay for as long as you want to use the service.
Paid plans start at €4 a month for one language and up to 10,000 words.
2. TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a multilingual WordPress plugin that allows you to translate every aspect of your website. A major advantage of TranslatePress is that you can translate directly from the frontend.
While translating, you can easily switch languages, and the live preview will update immediately. You can also translate content, theme, plugins, and meta-data without changing the interface using this approach.
TranslatePress is perfect for translating manually. You can translate yourself or assign a custom translator role to a member of your site. It will be possible for these users to translate content without using the admin area.
In case manual translations sound like too much work, you can also use Google Translate to translate languages. You can use this approach to combine AI-powered translations with manual corrections.
The plugin creates SEO-friendly URLs for all languages, which improves local search results.
Pricing: Starting at €79 for personal licenses.
3. WPML
WPML is a popular multilingual plugin for WordPress. It offers an integrated translation management system that lets you translate content, themes, plugins, and more.
WPML offers Multilingual blog and Multilingual CMS licensing plans. In addition to eCommerce, page builder support, custom fields, translation team management, and more, you’ll need the multilingual CMS plan.
It provides an easy interface for managing multilingual content across your website. The WPML plugin works with all post types, taxonomies, custom fields, and strings generated by WordPress themes and plugins.
In addition, you can connect your website with third-party translation services. Select the content that needs to be translated and have it directly submitted to your website.
Pricing: It costs $29 for multilingual blogs and $79 for multilingual content management systems.
4. Polylang
Another useful plugin for creating multilingual or bilingual WordPress sites is Polylang. Simple web interfaces make it easy to integrate translations into your posts, pages, widgets, and other content.
Polylang does not include support for translating WordPress themes or plugins. As the plugin doesn’t include eCommerce support by default, you will need to purchase an addon for that purpose.
It allows you to customize SEO-friendly URLs for each language, and it integrates with the most popular SEO plugins. You can implement this as a sidebar widget on your website.
Pricing: Free for the base plugin. It costs €99 for a single-site license of the Pro version.
5. WeGlot
Weglot is a website translation platform that runs in the cloud. It is compatible with WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more.
During the setup, Weglot API must be entered to connect your WordPress site to their platform. Afterward, you will select the language of your choice, the language of your site, and a few languages that you would like to add.
Weglot’s website is used to translate all your content, manage translations, and push translations live on your site.
It also supports SEO-friendly URLs, WooCommerce, and translated third-party content.
It charges a monthly fee based on the number of languages and words it translates. In some cases, you may find this to be more expensive than multilingual WordPress plugins with a fixed yearly fee.
Pricing: Starting at €8.25 / month for 1 language and 10,000 words.
Their PRO plan is currently available for €41 per month with unlimited language support.
6. MultilingualPress
The MultilingualPress plugin for WordPress takes a different approach to create multilingual websites. Instead of running on a normal WordPress install, it uses a multisite WordPress network built into WordPress.
Therefore, the plugin can efficiently manage content for each language and optimize performance at the same time by loading each language at a time. It provides easy management of your translations from a single dashboard.
The plugin supports posts, pages, custom post types, and taxonomies, among others. Because of its architecture, each language can exist on a separate subdomain, directory, or even its own domain name.
Pricing: Starting at $199 a year for one-site licenses.
Top WordPress Translation Plugins
The plugins allow you to translate parts of your website automatically or manually using automated translation services.
7. Translate WordPress with GTranslate
GTranslate is a WordPress translation plugin based on Google Translate. The app automatically connects to Google translate API and can fetch translations for any supported language.
The tool allows you to add a language switcher to your web pages and automatically translate content based on the user’s browser language.
The plugin also offers a paid version with SEO-friendly URLs that lets you let search engines index your translated content (more on that later in the article).
8. Transposh WordPress Translation
A combination of automated machine translations and human translations is used by Transposh. Also, you can let your visitors contribute translations using a simple in-context feature on your website.
You can hire professional translation services to submit translations through the plugin. Our automated translation service supports Google, Bing, Yandex, and Apertium.
9. Google Website Translator
The Google Website Translator plugin uses the Google Translate API to translate your website’s content. It uses the Google translate button that you can display wherever you like on your website.
You can select which languages to display in the language switcher, which you can use as a sidebar widget or shortcode inline.
You can offer machine translations on specific pages using the shortcode feature. A translated version of the page will be displayed to users when they select the language or when the plugin detects it from their browser settings.
10. Loco Translate
The Loco Translate plugin is slightly different from the other translation plugins on this list. The plugin allows you to translate WordPress themes and plugins.
You can use Loco Translate to translate your WordPress theme or plugin if it is translation-ready. With this tool, you have two columns: one for the original text and another for the translation.
Here are our picks for the best WordPress multilingual plugins
To manually translate content on your website using a WordPress plugin, we suggest TranslatePress.
The tool is easy to use even for those who do not have much prior experience running multilingual websites. It’s optimized for SEO and performance, both of which can benefit your business.
To translate WordPress automatically with Gtranslate, we recommend Translate WordPress with Gtranslate. There is even a free version that is quite good for automated translations.
Search engines should be able to index automated machine translations, right?
With some translation plugins, you can submit automatic translations for search engine indexing.
Those machine translations aren’t very good. There can be times when they are odd and even misleading. Putting this low-quality content into search engines is a terrible idea. Google can identify such content and will consider it spam, which will lower your site’s search ranking.
However, you should definitely allow Google to index your translated versions of your manual translations so that you can rank higher in local SEO.
We hope the following article helped you find the best WordPress translation plugin for your multilingual website.
