You can connect with new people in ways that you wouldn’t be able to with a single language. And, if you’re running a business, you’ll be able to reach new customers and create a better experience for your existing multilingual customers, including offering multilingual customer support and achieving other benefits.

In this post, we’re going to dig into the topic of multilingual translation in detail.

We’ll start with a look at what a multilingual translator is, the different approaches that you can take to multilingual translation, and some of the best multilingual translator services.

Then, if you have a website, we’ll end with some tips on how to implement multilingual translation for a website.

Let’s get started!

What Is a Multilingual Translator?

A multilingual translator is a tool or service that helps you translate existing content into one or more new languages. This “existing content” could be text, a website, documents, images, and so on.

Good multilingual translation is not just translating content word-for-word, though. Instead, a quality multilingual translator will take context and tone into account to capture the full meaning of the original text.

Some translators will also go beyond just translation and also localize the content in the new language and/or locale. This means accounting for any important cultural differences. 

For example, if the original text referenced Imperial measurements, a localized translation might change those measurements to the Metric system if the target audience is people living in a country that uses Metric.

Different Types of Multilingual Translators

There are different types of multilingual translators, and choosing the best approach for your specific situation will depend on your needs and budget.

Below, we’ll cover three different types of translators:

1. Machine translation
2. Service/agency translation
3. Freelancer translation

Machine / Automatic Translation

Machine translators are probably the most popular and well-known multilingual translators, primarily because they’re usually free and easy to use.

These are automated tools that translate content using different types of algorithms, primarily machine learning (for high-quality services).

The most well-known machine translation service is Google Translate, but you’ll find plenty of other options including DeepL, Microsoft Translator, and more.

While there’s a lot to like about machine multilingual translators from a cost and convenience perspective, the main downside is that they still aren’t perfectly accurate.

Machine translation accuracy has improved a lot, especially for popular language pairs (like English and Spanish). For a lot of use cases, automatic translation is good enough.

However, it’s still not perfect. So if you have a situation where you absolutely need 100% perfect translations, you might want to choose one of the other approaches for multilingual translation.

Accuracy is still one of the biggest differences between machine translation vs human methods.

Service/Agency

For larger translation projects, you can find dedicated services/agencies that are focused on multilingual translations.

These agencies typically offer an end-to-end service where they help with all aspects of multilingual translation, including translation itself, as well as any other needed localization.

Many agencies can also help with the technical parts of multilingual translation, such as how to actually implement the translations in your workflows (such as adding them to your website or creating translated documents).

However, if you built your website with WordPress, you probably don’t need an agency to implement the technical parts of the translation. Instead, you can just use a quality translation plugin like TranslatePress.

Freelancer

If you don’t want to work with an entire translation agency (which can be pricey), you can also work directly with a freelance translator.

These are individual translators who work on a solo basis and can help with all different types of multilingual translation needs.

While there are always exceptions, using a freelance translator can often work out to be cheaper than a full agency (though still more expensive than machine translation).

You’ll usually hire these freelancers through one of the many freelance translator marketplaces that are out there.

The only downside is that you’ll need to be responsible for vetting the quality of the translator. Thankfully, many freelance translator marketplaces include review systems to help you make your decision.

Best Automatic Multilingual Translation Tools

As I mentioned earlier, machine-based multilingual translators are the most popular type of multilingual translators out there.

So in this section, we want to take a quick look at some of the most popular options.

If you want a more detailed look, though, we have whole posts on the best machine translation services for WordPress sites and the best machine translation software. If you’re interested in leveraging newer AI technologies, we also rounded up the best AI translation tools.

Google Translate

Google Translate is the most popular machine translation service by a good margin. It supports over 133 different languages, so it can handle pretty much any situation.

You can use it to translate text, images, or documents from the browser-based web interface at translate.google.com. Or, you can also access it via Google’s Cloud Translation API, which lets you use Google Translate to translate your own website (more on that later).

These flexible options make Google Translate great for business use, as well as your personal translation needs.

Thanks to improvements to its machine learning algorithms, Google Translate can be pretty accurate for popular language pairs. However, the accuracy might drop a bit for hard-to-translate language pairs.

DeepL

DeepL is another popular machine translation service that’s known for the quality of its translations, especially when it comes to understanding context and making translations sound “natural”.

However, it doesn’t support nearly as many languages as Google Translate, and is primarily focused on European languages (though it does support some other languages, such as Japanese).

You can use it via a web interface, desktop software, or the API. We cover all of this in more detail in our full DeepL review.

We also have a DeepL vs Google Translate comparison that covers some of the key similarities and differences.

Microsoft Translator

As the name suggests, Microsoft Translator is Microsoft’s tool for automatic machine translation.

You can use Microsoft Translator in a ton of different ways, including a web-based interface, smartphone apps, and an API via Microsoft’s Azure cloud services.

Some people find that Microsoft Translator isn’t quite as good as Google Translate or DeepL when it comes to accuracy, but it’s still a very solid option for machine translation. 

It’s also cheaper than both of those other options, which makes it one of the cheapest multilingual translators out there.

We have a post that compares Microsoft Translator vs Google Translator if you want more details.

Interested In Translation Services or Freelancers? Check Out These Posts

As I mentioned earlier, automatic machine translation tools are not the only types of multilingual translators out there.

If you’re interested in a more human touch for your translation needs, you might want to check out these posts:

• Best marketplaces to find freelance translators
• Guide to translation outsourcing
• Best translation companies
• How to implement professional website translation

How to Use a Multilingual Translator on Your Website With WordPress and TranslatePress

If you’ve built your website with WordPress, the easiest way to use a multilingual translator is via a free translation plugin like TranslatePress.

TranslatePress lets you implement all the different types of multilingual translators, including machine translation, service/agency translation, and freelancer translation.

Regardless of which approach you choose, you (or your translation agency/freelancer) will be able to manage all of your website’s translations from a point-and-click visual editor that looks like this:

For machine translation, TranslatePress lets you choose between using Google Translate or DeepL. We have tons of guides on how you can set this up:

• How to use Google Translate on WordPress
• How to use DeepL on WordPress

You can use Google Translate with the free version of TranslatePress and you can access DeepL by purchasing the TranslatePress Business license.

For translation from an agency or freelancer, TranslatePress also includes a special translator accounts feature to help you give translators access to your website. Users with a translator account will be able to access the translation features in your site, but they won’t be able to access any other areas.

You can access the special translator accounts feature by purchasing the TranslatePress Business license.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress translation plugin to help you implement a machine or human multilingual translator on your website.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Get Started With Multilingual Translation Today!

Whether you need to translate a small amount of text or an entire website, a multilingual translator can help you get the job done.

For a lot of people, using a machine translation service like Google Translate or DeepL is the most cost-effective and convenient solution for multilingual translation.

However, you can also consider hiring a human translation agency or freelancer if you have a situation where translation accuracy is incredibly important (and you’re willing to pay for that accuracy).

If you want to translate your own WordPress website, the free TranslatePress plugin offers an easy way to use a multilingual translation service to translate all of your website’s content.

TranslatePress supports machine translation via Google Translate or DeepL for automatic translation, and it also offers a translator account feature to help you work with agencies or freelancers.

If you’re ready to get started, install the free TranslatePress plugin today.

To access even more helpful features like support for unlimited languages, DeepL translation, translator accounts, and more, you can purchase a TranslatePress license.

You can always start using the free version and upgrade later on – you won’t lose any of your work when you upgrade from the free version to the premium version.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress translation plugin to help you implement a machine or human multilingual translator on your website.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Do you still have any questions about multilingual translation services? Let us know in the comments!

The post What is a Multilingual Translator? (And What Are Your Best Options) appeared first on TranslatePress.

But what about using Google Translate for business? Is Google Translate still a good option for businesses that need to translate websites, documents, customer communication, and so on?

In this post, we’re going to dig into that question in detail, with a look at the pros and cons of using Google Translate for business and entrepreneurship.

We’ll start with a quick introduction to the different ways that businesses might want to use Google Translate. Then, we’ll cover four pros and two cons, to help you make the right choice.

To finish, we’ll share a quick guide for how you can use Google Translate to translate your own business website.

How Can Businesses Use Google Translate?

Thinking through what you want to achieve with Google Translate will help you know whether the pros outweigh the cons for your specific business use case.

So, before we get to the pros and cons, let’s run through some of the most common ways that businesses can use Google Translate.

Website Translation

If you want to offer your business website in multiple languages, you can use Google Translate to automatically translate some or all of your website’s content.

Not only does this make it easier for a multilingual audience to use your website, but it can also have marketing benefits for your business, such as helping you rank your translated content in Google via multilingual SEO.

Depending on how you built your website, you might even be able to integrate Google Translate directly into your website, which can save you from needing to manually copy and paste content into Google Translate.

For example, if you built your business website with WordPress, you could use the TranslatePress plugin to automatically translate all of your site’s content with the Google Translate API and then manage those translations through a visual editor like this:

Your site’s users will also be able to easily switch between different languages using a frontend language switcher, which you can see in the bottom-right corner of the screenshot above.

Document and Image Translation

Your business probably relies on a lot of documents, whether that’s documents that you’ve created or documents that you’ve received from third parties.

With Google Translate, you can translate documents and images by uploading the files directly or using the Google Translate API, which can be really convenient for many businesses.

Google Translate doesn’t offer a desktop translation app like DeepL, but you can still easily translate documents via the web interface.

Customer Communication

If you have a multilingual customer base, you might use Google Translate to translate various types of customer communication, such as emails and social media posts.

This can let you connect with customers in different languages without needing to hire a multilingual marketing team.

Just be careful about using Google Translate for really sensitive customer communication – we’ll talk about this more in a second.

Advantages of Using Google Translate for Business

Now that you understand how your business might use Google Translate, let’s start by looking at some of the advantages of using Google Translate for business.

Then, in the next section, we’ll also go over some of the potential drawbacks of using Google Translate for entrepreneurship and business.

Faster Than Human Translation

One of the biggest advantages of Google Translate is the speed and scale at which it lets you implement translation for your business.

When you use Google Translate, you’ll get your translations back immediately, which means there’s no need to wait around for human translators to do the work for you. This can be especially helpful if you have a tight deadline for a translation project that you need to complete.

Beyond the speed, there are also no limitations on the scale of your translations. Whether you’re translating 100 words or one million words (or 100 documents), you can still get the job done instantly.

You could try to fix bottlenecks with speed and/or scale and human translation by increasing the size of your human translation team. However, that quickly brings us to another big advantage of using Google Translate for your business…

Cheaper Than Human Translation

Beyond being faster than human translators, Google Translate is also a lot cheaper – or maybe even free for your use case.

Hiring a quality professional translation service or a freelance translator can quickly get expensive, especially for a large translation project (such as translating all of your business website’s content).

Even small-to-mid-sized projects could easily cost thousands of dollars if you outsource translations to humans.

In contrast, using the Google Translate web-based interface is free, which might be all you need for certain small business use cases (e.g. occasional document translation).

Even if you need to use the Google Translate API, there’s still a free plan that lets you translate up to 500,000 characters per month for free (around 100,000 words).

If you need to exceed that monthly limit, paid usage costs just $20 per one million characters. 

Or, for document translation over the API, you’ll pay just $0.08 per document page, which is significantly cheaper than what you’d pay for a human translator.

Accurate Enough for Most Use Cases

While Google Translate has improved a lot over the past several years, it’s still not 100% accurate when it comes to translations. With that being said, it is accurate enough for many business use cases.

A big part of this comes from a change in approach that Google implemented in 2016, moving from an older word-by-word translation system to its new Google Neural Machine Translation approach, which translates the meaning of entire sentences. This approach allows Google to generate more accurate, natural-sounding translations.

The exact accuracy will depend on the specific languages that you’re translating to/from.

For example, because English/Spanish is such a popular language combination, it has very good accuracy – 92-94% accuracy according to some well-known studies. 

Less common language pairs can be less accurate, however.

Unless your use case requires perfect 100% accuracy (which is only achievable with manual human translation), then Google Translate can often be good enough for most business use cases.

For a deeper look at this question, you can check out our full post about Google Translate accuracy.

Easy to Integrate Via the Cloud Translation API

Many people know of Google Translate for its web-based interface that looks like this:

You can enter some text or upload a document and get the translation right there in your web browser.

However, you can also access Google Translate translations via the Google Cloud Translation API, which opens up some really interesting opportunities for business use cases.

For example, let’s say that you have a WordPress website for your business and you want to use Google Translate to translate all of your site’s content into one or more new languages.

Rather than manually pasting the content into the Google Translate browser interface and then copying those translations into WordPress, you could instead use a WordPress translation plugin like TranslatePress.

TranslatePress lets you connect your WordPress site to Google Translate using the API. The plugin can seamlessly send your site’s content to Google for translation and then store the translated content in your website’s database (which means all of the translations are still “live” on the web server that your business controls).

What’s more, TranslatePress lets you manually refine those translations as needed using its visual translation editor, which offers a simple point-and-click approach.

Because Google Translate is so popular, you’ll find a lot of these types of integrations for different business use cases.

If you go with a less well-known machine translation service (or even manual translation), you might not be able to access as many helpful integrations.

Disadvantages of Using Google Translate for Business

While there are a lot of positives when it comes to using Google Translate for business use cases, it’s not perfect.

Before your business goes all in on Google Translate, you’ll first want to consider some of the potential negatives…

Accuracy Is Still Not Perfect

While we said that Google Translate is accurate enough for most business use cases in the previous section, it’s still important to note that Google Translate is not 100% accurate.

Again, this is especially noticeable in less common language pairs, but even common language pairs like English/Spanish are still only in the 92-94% accurate range.

If your business has a use case where accuracy is paramount, you still might not want to rely on Google Translate for that.

For example, let’s say you want to email a customer feedback survey to people who have stopped using your product/service. This can be a bit of a touchy subject, and you’ll want to make sure every word in your email is written in a way that respects the customer.

If you rely on Google Translate, you might inadvertently send an email that offends your former customers, which could end up doing more harm than good.

Even if the translation is technically “accurate”, the way that the translation is phrased could still offend customers in a way that content translated by a human would not.

Basically, if your business is in a situation where an inaccurate or unnatural translation could cause real harm to your business, you should still opt for professional human translation.

Potential Issues With Data Handling

Because Google Translate is powered by Google’s servers, all the content that you want to translate will need to pass through Google’s servers in order to generate the translations.

For business use cases, this might bring up certain data privacy issues:

• Regulatory compliance – local laws in your jurisdiction might not allow you to pass certain types of customer data to any third party. If your translation use case involves translating these types of data, that might mean Google Translate isn’t an option for your business.
• Business policies – even if you’re not legally prevented from sending data to Google Translate, your business might have its own data security policies in place that don’t allow you to transmit data to a third-party service like Google Translate.

Overall, relying on Google Translate for sensitive data might be tricky, so we always recommend consulting an expert before doing so.

With that being said, most translation use cases do not involve sensitive customer data, so this issue won’t affect how most businesses use Google Translate.

How to Translate Your Business Website With Google Translate

As we mentioned above, one of the most common business use cases for Google Translate is to translate your business website’s content into one or more new languages.

If you built your business website with WordPress, one of the easiest ways to use Google Translate in this way is via the TranslatePress plugin.

TranslatePress lets you connect your WordPress site to Google Translate to translate 100% of your site’s content into one or more new languages.

TranslatePress will use the Cloud Translation API to send your site’s content to Google Translate. Then, it will also store the finished translations in your WordPress site’s database, which means you still have full ownership/control over the translated content.

This is an important difference from some other Google Translate plugins that don’t actually save the translations in your database.

Once you’ve generated the translations, TranslatePress lets you manage them from a visual, drag-and-drop editor. This is helpful because it means you can still have a human translator edit/refine the translations where needed.

Your website’s visitors can also choose which language to browse your site in using a frontend language switcher, which you’re free to customize as needed. You can even add your language switcher to builder plugins like Elementor.

To learn more about how to set it up, you can check out these blog posts:

• How to use Google Translate to translate WordPress
• How to automatically translate WordPress (with Google Translate or DeepL)
• How to add Google Translate to any website

The free version of TranslatePress supports using Google Translate to automatically translate your site into one new language.

If you want support for unlimited languages, as well as a bunch of other helpful features, you can upgrade to the premium version of TranslatePress starting at just €89.

Final Thoughts on Google Translate for Business

Overall, Google Translate can be really helpful for different parts of your business, whether that’s translating your website, documents, text, and so on.

With that being said, it’s not perfect, so you might not want to use it for every single use case.

To recap, here are some of the main advantages of using Google Translate for business:

• Faster and more scalable than manual human translation.
• Cheaper than hiring a freelance translator or a professional translation service.
• Accurate enough for most use cases, especially where absolutely perfect clarity is not needed.
• Easy to integrate with other tools that your business is using, such as adding Google Translate to WordPress with the TranslatePress plugin.

However, there are also some potential downsides that might make it not a good fit for certain business use cases:

• Not perfectly accurate yet, so you might not want to use it for very sensitive and/or important translations.
• Potential data privacy issues if you’re not able/willing to transmit data to a third party (because using Google Translate requires briefly sending the content that you want to translate through Google’s servers).

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress multilingual plugin to use Google Translate for business.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Do you still have any questions about business or entrepreneurship Google Translate usage? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Is Google Translate Good for Business Use? 4 Pros and 2 Cons appeared first on TranslatePress.

Most of the time, Loco Translate offers an easy way to let you translate strings in the core WordPress software, as well as your themes and plugins. You can use this ability to localize your site in whatever single language you want to use.

However, sometimes you’ll run into issues with Loco Translate not translating some or all of the content in some or all of your site’s extensions. Or, you might experience other problems, such as errors when saving, missing translation files, and so on.

If that’s happening to you, this post is here to help.

Below, we’ll start off by explaining the most common causes of Loco Translate not working, along with how to fix those issues.

If those troubleshooting steps aren’t able to fix your problem, we’ll also share a Loco Translate alternative that gives you another way to translate your site’s content (or even create a multilingual website, if that’s your goal).

Loco Translate Not Working: Common Issues and Fixes

Without further introduction, let’s get straight into our tips for fixing issues with Loco Translate not working.

In addition to some general tips to try before you go any further, we’ll cover fixes for seven types of problems:

• Loco Translate is missing some strings in a theme or plugin (but is otherwise working correctly)
• Loco Translate translations aren’t showing up on your site
• Translation files keep disappearing
• Errors when saving or syncing files (e.g. 404 Not Found or other 400-level errors)
• 413 Request Entity Too Large error when saving files
• Allowed memory size exhausted error (especially when syncing files)
• Not being able to translate dynamic content

Try These Things Before Troubleshooting

Before you get any further into troubleshooting issues with Loco Translate not translating, you’ll first want to perform some housekeeping steps to eliminate some basic issues.

Update to the Latest Version of Everything

First, make sure that you’re using the latest version of everything that’s involved in translating your site. That includes the Loco Translate plugin itself, as well as the core WordPress software and the themes/plugins that you’re translating.

Set Your WordPress Site Language

Next, make sure that you’ve properly set your WordPress site’s language to the correct language that you want to use on your site:

1. Go to Settings → General in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Set the Site Language equal to the language that you want to use.
3. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom.

Clear Your Caches

Finally, make sure to clear all of the caches on your site.

Caching is a great way to improve performance by storing files in a static cache instead of downloading them/generating them dynamically. However, if something is wrong in the cached file, that can cause all kinds of weird issues.

For this reason, a good first troubleshooting step with any WordPress issue is always to clear your cache.

Here’s how:

1. Clear the browser cache in the web browser that you’re using to access your site. Kinsta has a guide that shows you how to clear the browser cache in all popular browsers.
2. Clear your site’s page cache. You can do this via your host if your host offers server-level caching or via your caching plugin.
3. Clear the CDN cache if you’re using a CDN service.

Once you’ve performed these basic troubleshooting steps, you can move on to the Loco Translate-specific steps if Loco Translate is still not translating content.

Loco Translate Translations Aren’t Showing Up

In some situations, you might be able to translate everything in the backend of Loco Translate. However, those translations might not actually show up on the frontend of your site.

Obviously, that’s frustrating, so let’s go through some potential problems and fixes.

Your Translation Files Might Have Been Deleted

Depending on how you save your translation files, they might get deleted when you apply an update, which will lead to Loco Translate not translating content on the frontend of your site.

We cover how to fix this problem in a dedicated section below. But the basic idea is that you should try to save your translation files in a special folder that Loco Translate creates on your server. This will protect them from being overwritten when you apply updates.

You can move your translation file to a new folder from the Relocate tab. We recommend trying the Custom option and seeing if that fixes the problem.

Your WordPress Site Language Is Wrong

We already covered this in the “Try These Things Before Troubleshooting” section above. But if your WordPress language isn’t set properly, that will mean your translations don’t load.

For example, if your translations are in Spanish but your site language is still set to English, WordPress will display everything in English rather than using your translations.

Your Translation Files Aren’t Being Loaded

You also might have issues if your translation files exist, but aren’t being loaded.

Unfortunately, you’ll need to feel comfortable analyzing code to implement many of these troubleshooting steps. Additionally, you’ll often need to enlist the help of the plugin or theme’s developer to actually fix the problem for good.

There are a few reasons why themes and plugins might not load your translation files:

• The extension isn’t calling the load_textdomain function (load_theme_textdomain for themes and load_plugin_textdomain for plugins). You’ll need to ask the extension’s developer to fix this problem to ensure your translations load correctly.
• Your translation files aren’t named correctly. This can happen if the extension is coded incorrectly and declaring a different text domain than the one it actually uses. Again, you’ll need to contact the extension’s developer to have them fix this.
• The extension’s translation template is out of date. If the translation template doesn’t match the source code, this could mean that the strings that you thought you translated don’t actually exist in the source code. Again, you’ll need to ask the developer to update the translation template.

Loco Translate Is Missing Some Strings in a Theme or Plugin

In some cases, you might run into a situation where Loco Translate mostly works, but it’s not recognizing certain strings in the theme or plugin that you want to translate.

This could lead to an awkward situation where you have incomplete translations, with some content being properly translated while the remaining content is still in the original language.

The most common issue here is the way in which the theme or plugin is coded. For example, if the plugin is dynamically storing the relevant string in your site’s database as a WordPress site option, you might not be able to access it in Loco Translate.

However, there are also some other potential issues, so it’s worth digging a little deeper into this problem.

Make Sure You Know Where the String Is Coming From

The first troubleshooting step is to make sure that you actually know where the string is coming from.

For example, if you think the string is coming from the core WordPress software but it’s actually coming from a plugin, that might explain why you’re unable to find it.

You might also have situations where the same string is located in two different spots. You might’ve translated one source of that string, but missed the other source. 

Run a Sync If the String Is Completely Missing

Once you know exactly where the string should be, you can start debugging things in more depth.

If you cannot find the string at all, you should try syncing translations again. You can do this by clicking the Sync button in the editor:

This can often fix the problem, but it’s not foolproof. 

For example, if the extension developer hasn’t provided a valid translation template, Loco Translate will need to try to extract the strings from the source code, which might not work in certain situations (it largely depends on how the developer has coded things and whether they followed best practices).

You can create your own translation template to fix the problem. However, you’ll need development knowledge to do so, so this isn’t a fix for casual users. Your best bet would be to reach out to the developer behind the extension to ask them for help.

Loco Translate Translation Files Keep Disappearing

If you’re running into issues with your Loco Translate translation files disappearing, the most common issues are automatic WordPress updates and the location where you’ve saved your translation files.

If you’re saving your translation files in the plugin or theme folder of the content that you’re translating, those translation files will usually be overwritten whenever you update the relevant theme or plugin.

This can also happen with core translations when WordPress updates the installed languages on your site.

If you have automatic updates enabled for themes and plugins, this could happen automatically even without you manually updating the extension.

To fix this, you should make sure to save your translation files in the “safe” directory that Loco Translate provides. This is located in the following folder:

wp-content/languages/loco

You can choose this by selecting the Custom option when you’re creating/moving a file.

By saving translation files in this folder, you can be confident that they won’t be overwritten during WordPress updates.

For core translation files, you can also disable automatic translation file updates by adding the following filter to your site’s wp-config.php file:

add_filter( 'auto_update_translation', '__return_false' );

400-Level HTTP Errors When Saving Loco Translate (404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden, 410 Gone, etc.)

If you’re experiencing 400-level HTTP errors when trying to save Loco Translate, the most common problem is an issue in your server’s configuration.

Common error codes here include the following:

• 404 Not Found
• 403 Forbidden
• 410 Gone

These can be trickier to fix because it involves how your server is configured. As a result, you might need some technical knowledge to debug these issues.

Here are some tips for areas to consider:

• Check Gzip compression configuration – some server compression modules (e.g. mod_deflate) can cause issues. You can try disabling Gzip compression when making requests to wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.
• Try disabling PHP’s zlib.output_compression setting.
• Try temporarily disabling your site’s firewall – you could be experiencing issues because of a security plugin like Wordfence or a server module like mod_security. You should not leave the firewall permanently disabled, though, so you’ll need to find a more long-term solution if this is causing the problem.

If all else fails, consider reaching out to your hosting service, as they might be able to adjust the server configuration to stop the issue from happening.

413 Request Entity Too Large When Saving Files in Loco Translate

Another issue you might run into when saving files is the 413 Request Entity Too Large error.

This error happens when the PO file that you’re trying to save is larger than what your server is configured to accept via POST data.

If your server’s configuration is below the size of the PO file (which can happen for large plugins like WooCommerce), you’ll need to raise the limit to fix the problem.

To check your server’s current limit, you can go to Loco Translate → Settings → Debug in your WordPress dashboard and look at the PHP post_max_size limit.

To increase these limits, you’ll need to edit your server’s configuration, focusing on these limits:

• the PHP post_max_size limit (not the upload_max_filesize limit, which is what many users focus on)
• If using Apache, the LimitRequestBody limit
• If using Nginx, the client_max_body_size limit

If you don’t feel comfortable editing these server-level configuration files, we recommend reaching out to your host’s support for help.

Allowed Memory Size Exhausted When Syncing in Loco Translate

When you first extract text strings from a file, Loco Translate can have high memory usage during those operations, especially for larger translation files where the developer hasn’t provided a translation template.

This can lead to a memory usage spike that triggers the “Error: Allowed memory size exhausted” message.

If possible, you can try to raise the memory limit of your site/server:

• Increase the PHP memory limit
• Increase the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT variable in your site’s wp-config.php file

You can check your site’s current limits by going to Loco Translate → Settings → Debug.

If you don’t feel comfortable making these changes yourself, you can reach out to your host’s support for help.

If increasing the memory limit isn’t possible, Loco Translate lets you skip files over a certain maximum size. By default, it skips files larger than 100K, but you can adjust this by going Loco Translate → Settings and adjusting the number.

Loco Translate Doesn’t Let You Translate Dynamic Content (E.g. Content in the WordPress Editor)

This last one isn’t really an instance of Loco Translate not working – it’s just outside the scope of what Loco Translate offers.

Loco Translate makes it easy for you to access and translate the translation files in the WordPress core, plugins, and themes.

However, it does not help you translate content that you’ve added in the WordPress editor or other dynamic areas.

For a single language site, this isn’t a problem because you can just add that content in your target language.

But if you want to create a multilanguage site where users can choose between two or more languages for each piece of content, Loco Translate probably isn’t the right plugin for the job.

That brings us to the next part of our article – a Loco Translate alternative that you can consider if you’re still experiencing issues with Loco Translate and/or you want to actually create a multilingual WordPress site.

TranslatePress: An Alternative to Consider If Loco Translate Isn’t Working

If you’re still having issues on WordPress with Loco Translate not working, you can consider TranslatePress.

TranslatePress offers an easy way to translate all of your site’s content using a visual, point-and-click editor. It offers a comprehensive approach, with full support for content from the WordPress core, as well as any plugins and themes that you’re using.

Here’s a more detailed look at why TranslatePress can make a great Loco Translate alternative…

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best Loco Translate alternative to consider if you're having problems with Loco Translate not working

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Comprehensive Translations, Even If a Plugin Is Coded Differently

One of the advantages of TranslatePress is that it’s able to offer comprehensive translation support for all the content on your site, including plugins and themes.

While Loco Translate generally does a good job of detecting strings in the plugins and themes that you’re translating, you might run into certain situations in which Loco Translate isn’t able to detect certain strings, which can leave you with incomplete translations.

This typically happens because of how the theme/plugin developer has coded their extension, rather than an issue with Loco Translate itself. But the end result is the same – you struggle to fully translate your site.

TranslatePress is able to bypass this issue by using a different method of detecting translations. Rather than looking at the behind-the-scenes code in a certain theme or plugin, TranslatePress instead looks at the frontend output of your site.

If a certain string appears on your site, TranslatePress will let you translate it regardless of how it appears in the behind-the-scenes code. It also still offers special handling for WordPress gettext content.

Overall, if you’ve been frustrated by incomplete translations or the difficulty in translating certain strings on your site, TranslatePress can be a good alternative to consider.

Visual, Point-and-Click Translation Editor

Whereas Loco Translate has you work using an interface that resembles a traditional PO editor, TranslatePress lets you manage translations using a visual, point-and-click editor.

You’ll see a live preview of your page on the right and a sidebar on the left.

To open a string for translation, all you need to do is hover over it and click on the pencil icon. The pencil icon will be green for gettext strings and blue for dynamic strings.

Full Multilingual Support

Loco Translate is primarily just a tool for accessing an easier way to manage translations. Instead of needing to work with .po or .mo files directly, it gives you an in-browser interface to access translations.

While this is great if you just need to translate a plugin or theme into a single language, it’s not so helpful if you want to actually create a multilingual website where your site’s visitors can use a frontend language switcher to choose between two or more different languages.

While you can use TranslatePress on a single-language site, its primary focus is helping you create a working multilingual website.

Affordable Pricing (Plus a Free Version)

Like Loco Translate, TranslatePress offers a free version that’s available at WordPress.org, as well as a premium version that adds more functionality.

The free version already gives you access to the visual translation editor, as well as the ability to translate all of the frontend content from the core WordPress software and your themes/plugins.

If you want access to even more functionality, the premium version adds support for unlimited languages (great for multilingual sites with 3+ languages), dedicated translator accounts, multilingual SEO features, and more, starting at just €89.

When in doubt, you can always start with the free version and upgrade later on. All of your translations and settings will still be there even if you move from the free version to the premium version.

How to Get Started With TranslatePress

If you want to try TranslatePress as a Loco Translate alternative, here’s a very quick guide on how you can get started:

1. Install the free TranslatePress plugin from WordPress.org (or purchase and install the premium version). 
2. Go to Settings → TranslatePress to choose which languages you want to offer on your site.
3. Optional – Go to the Automatic Translation tab in the TranslatePress settings area to set up machine translation via Google Translate or DeepL.
4. Open a page with content that you want to translate on the frontend of your site – this could be content from the core software, a theme, a plugin, and so on. As long as the content is visible somewhere on that page, you’ll be able to translate it.
5. Click the new Translate Page option on the WordPress toolbar to launch the visual translation editor.
6. On the live preview of your site, hover over the piece of content that you want to translate and click the pencil icon.
7. Add your translation in the sidebar and save your changes.
8. Repeat to translate additional content as needed.

To view full tutorials that cover all of these in a lot more depth, you can check out these posts:

• How to create a multilingual WordPress site
• The ultimate guide to creating a multilingual website
• How to offer WordPress in multiple languages

Loco Translate Not Working? Now You Can Fix It

Loco Translate is a great tool for helping you translate content on WordPress. However, things can quickly turn frustrating if you run into a situation where Loco Translate isn’t working properly.

In this post, you learned a number of troubleshooting tips to figure out what’s going wrong and fix Loco Translate not working.

If you’re still running into problems after trying these fixes, you also might want to consider TranslatePress as a Loco Translate alternative.

If you want to try TranslatePress and see if it meets your needs for your current situation, you can install the free version from WordPress.org to already access the ability to comprehensively translate your site.

Then, you can always upgrade to the premium version of TranslatePress to access additional functionality without losing any of your existing translations.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best Loco Translate alternative to consider if you're having problems with Loco Translate not working

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

The post Loco Translate Not Working? Common Issues and How to Fix Them appeared first on TranslatePress.

Whether you want to translate your own website into or from Chinese or you want to translate someone else’s website into or from Chinese, this post has everything you need.

We’ll start with a quick look at a free Chinese to English website translator tool that lets you translate any website on the internet into Chinese or from Chinese.

However, the main focus of this post is on how to translate your own website into Chinese. This will let you create shareable, indexable versions of your site in both English and Chinese (or other languages, as well). And if you have a multilingual website audience, it’s a great way to help your website grow.

Let’s dig in!

Free Chinese to English Website Translator: Translate Any Website

If your goal is to translate your own website into Chinese so that you can offer a better experience for your visitors who speak Chinese (or from Chinese to English), you can skip ahead to the next section.

However, you also might have found this post because you want to translate someone else’s website into Chinese or from Chinese to English.

For example, maybe you’re browsing the internet and you found a website in Chinese that you’re interested in. If you don’t speak Chinese, you’ll need a way to translate that website into English.

If that’s your situation, we also have a solution for you – our free Chinese to English website translator tool.

To get started, open the free website translation tool. Then, follow these steps:

1. Choose the original language of the website – e.g. Chinese.
2. Choose the language into which you want to translate that website’s content – e.g. English.
3. Enter the website URL/page that you want to translate.
4. Click the Translate button.

The tool will then automatically launch the translated version of the site for you:

This tool works great if you’re browsing the web and you want to be able to translate a page into or from Chinese.

However, if you want to translate your own website, you’ll want to use a more permanent solution that creates static pages on your site for each language version. For the rest of this post, we’ll focus on how to translate your own website into Chinese so that you can let people browse your content in Chinese.

How to Translate a Website to Chinese (or From Chinese to English)

To permanently translate a website into Chinese or translate a Chinese website into English, you can use the free TranslatePress WordPress plugin.

TranslatePress adds multilingual functionality to WordPress so that you can translate your site’s content into unlimited new languages, with support for both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

To help you save time, you can also use automatic machine translation from Google Translate or DeepL. Or, you’re free to just manually translate your site from scratch.

Even if you use a machine translation tool, you’ll still be able to manage all of your Chinese and/or English translations from a visual, point-and-click editor like this:

TranslatePress Multilingual

The easiest way to translate your WordPress website from English into Chinese (or from Chinese into English).

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Let’s go through the full process…

1. Install the TranslatePress Plugin

To get started, you’ll want to install and activate the TranslatePress plugin on your WordPress site.

You can get started and follow this tutorial using just the free version of TranslatePress that’s listed at WordPress.org. However, there are also some notable advantages to using the premium version, which we’ll note in the tutorial.

For example, the premium version supports unlimited new languages, while the free version lets you add one new language. If you want to offer your site in both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese (along with other languages), you might want to purchase the premium version.

If you’re not sure, you can always start with the free version and upgrade later on. You will not lose any settings or translations and it only takes a few seconds to upgrade.

Here’s how to install the free TranslatePress plugin on your WordPress site:

1. Go to Plugins → Add New in your WordPress dashboard.
2. Search for “TranslatePress”.
3. Click the Install Now button.
4. After the installation finishes, click the Activate button (which will replace the Install Now button).

2. Choose Which Languages to Offer

Once you’ve activated the free TranslatPress plugin, you can go to Settings → TranslatePress to choose the languages that you want to use on your site using the All Languages settings.

For this example, we’ll assume that you have an English website that you want to translate into Chinese. However, the same basic steps apply if you want to translate a Chinese website into English.

Here’s what it looks like to translate an English website into Simplified Chinese for the Mainland China locale.

You can also set separate locales for Hong Kong or Taiwan. If you set your language to Chinese (Taiwan), it will use Traditional Chinese. The language code for this is zh_TW.

If you want to set the locale for other Chinese-speaking areas, you could also do so by adding a custom language. This lets you add Singapore, Macau, and other variations.

To add a custom language, go to Settings → TranslatePress → Advanced → Custom Language.

You can then add the language’s name and language code.

Here are some relevant language codes that you might want to consider:

• Traditional Chinese – zh-hant – this is the generic language code for Traditional Chinese. Again, setting your site to Chinese (Taiwan) will also use Traditional Chinese.
• Simplified Chinese (Singapore) – zh-sg
• Simplified Chinese (Macau) – zh-mo

Once you’ve added a custom language, you’ll be able to choose that language in the All Languages drop-down.

The free version of TranslatePress lets you translate your site into one new language. For example, you could have the default language (English) and then translate it into Simplified Chinese for Mainland China.

If you want support for more languages and/or locales, the premium version of TranslatePress supports unlimited languages. This would let you add Simplified and Traditional Chinese. Or, you could add other languages beyond English and Chinese.

3. Set Up Automatic Translation (Optional)

This next step is totally optional. However, if you want to save time when translating your site, TranslatePress supports automatic machine translation via both Google Translate and DeepL.

Or, if you don’t want to use automatic translation, you can completely skip this and just proceed to the next section to learn how to translate your site from scratch.

Multiple studies have shown that Google Translate is around 81% accurate at translating English to Chinese, at least in a medical setting. So while it’s not perfect, it can get you off to a pretty good start.

And because those studies focused on technical medical translations, the accuracy rate for more “regular” content is probably even higher.

Even if you do use automatic translation, you’ll still be able to manually edit and refine your translations as needed. 

Because of that, using automatic translation can still be a useful tool to speed up your editing process. You can use automatic translation to generate your site’s baseline translations and then fix things up manually where needed.

If you do want to use automatic translation, you can set it up from the Automatic Translation tab in the TranslatePress settings area.

Here are some posts that cover the setup process in more detail:

• Google Translate setup documentation
• DeepL setup documentation
• How to translate WordPress automatically
• How to use Google Translate in WordPress
• How to use DeepL in WordPress

Note – DeepL supports translating both Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese to English when you’re going from Chinese to English. However, if you’re going in the other direction (English → Chinese), you can only translate English into Simplified Chinese. DeepL does not let you translate other languages into Traditional Chinese (only the reverse).

Google Translate supports translating Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese in both directions. So if you want to translate an English website into Traditional Chinese, you’ll need to use Google Translate.

Our Google Translate vs DeepL comparison post digs into the differences between these two platforms in more detail.

4. Use the Visual Translation Editor to Add/Manage Translations

Whether you’re using manual translation or automatic translation, the next step is to use TranslatePress’s visual translation editor to manage your site’s translations:

• If you use automatic translation, all of your site’s translations will be prefilled with those from the automatic translation service. However, you’re still free to manually adjust things as needed.
• If you do not use automatic translation, you’ll need to manually add all of your translations from scratch.

To launch the translation editor, open the page that you want to translate on the frontend of your site. Then, click the Translate Page option on the WordPress toolbar.

Once the translation interface launches, you should see a live preview of the English version of your page on the right and a sidebar on your left (or the Chinese version of your page if you’re going from Chinese → English).

To translate any text/element on your site, all you need to do is hover over it and click the pencil icon that appears. This will open that content in the sidebar, where you can add or edit the Chinese translation as needed.

You can do this for all types of text content – headings, paragraph text, buttons, menus, forms, and so on. You can also go beyond text and “translate” images to show different images based on a user’s chosen language.

For example, here’s what it looks like to “translate” an image:

Once you’ve added a translation, all you need to do is save it and the translation will be live on your site.

You can repeat this process to translate all of the content on the page. Then, you can use the same approach to translate other pages on your site as needed.

Again, if you want to save time, you can use automatic translation to generate your site’s baseline translations.

Or, you can also work with a freelance Chinese translator or a professional translation service that offers Chinese translations.

If you do want to implement a professional website translation, purchasing the TranslatePress Business license lets you create dedicated translator accounts so that your translators can access your site’s translations without needing access to the rest of your WordPress dashboard.

5. Configure Your Site’s Language Switcher

To let visitors switch between English, Chinese, and any other languages that you want to offer on your site, TranslatePress comes with a built-in frontend language switcher.

By default, TranslatePress adds this as a floating option that appears in the bottom right corner of your website.

Here’s an example of what it might look like:

However, you also have plenty of options to customize both the placement and content of your language switcher.

On the placement front, you can easily add your language switcher to your site’s navigation menu. Or, you can manually place it anywhere on your site using a block or shortcode.

On the content front, you can make adjustments such as whether or not to show the country flag along with the language name.

To access the language switcher settings, you can go to Settings → TranslatePress and scroll down.

To learn more about adjusting the placement of your language switcher, check out these posts:

• How to add a WordPress language switcher
• TranslatePress language switcher documentation
• How to add an Elementor language switcher

With the free version of TranslatePress, visitors will see the original language of your site on their initial visit (e.g. English). Then, they would need to use the language switcher to change to the Chinese version of your site (or vice versa).

However, if you upgrade to the TranslatePress Business license, you can access a new feature that automatically redirects visitors to their preferred languages based on their web browser language setting or their IP address.

For example, someone browsing with their default language set to Chinese would automatically see the Chinese version of your site while someone with their default language set to English would automatically see the English version.

Translate Your Website to Chinese the Easy Way

That wraps up our guide on how to translate a website to Chinese without needing any special technical knowledge.

If you want to translate someone else’s website – e.g. a website that you found on the internet – you can use TranslatePress’s free website translator tool to translate between English and Chinese, as well as hundreds of other languages.

However, if you want to translate your own website from English to Chinese (or vice versa), you can use the TranslatePress WordPress plugin.

You’ll be able to create permanent translated pages on your site, which makes it easy for visitors to access them and lets search engines index your translated content in their rankings.

You can also choose between adding your Chinese translations manually from scratch or using automatic machine translation from Google Translate or DeepL. Either way, you can use the visual translation editor to manage all of your translations.

You can also use both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, along with other options to choose specific locales such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and others.

Best of all, you can perform most of these actions using the free version of TranslatePress at WordPress.org.

If you want to unlock even more functionality, though, the premium version adds a number of helpful features including the following:

• Improved multilingual SEO support to help you rank your translated content in Google and other search engines.
• Support for unlimited languages, which is useful if you want to offer your site’s content in more than just English and Chinese.
• Automatically redirect users to their preferred languages, which helps you create a better user experience.
• Support for DeepL automatic translation (the free version still supports Google Translate).

Purchase the premium version today to access these features, plus a bunch of other useful options.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The easiest way to translate your WordPress website from English into Chinese (or from Chinese into English).

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

The post How to Translate a Website to Chinese (or From Chinese) appeared first on TranslatePress.

Sitemaps are an essential feature for all WordPress sites because they help search engines (and potentially human visitors) discover your site’s content and understand the structure of your site.

In WordPress 5.5, released in August 2020, WordPress added a core feature to create an XML sitemap for your site. However, a lot of people still prefer using a sitemap plugin for WordPress because it gives you more control over sitemap functionality on your site.

In this post, we curated a list of the seven best sitemap plugins for WordPress – most of which have a functional free version.

Beyond sharing details about these plugins, we’ll also briefly cover some other important information about WordPress sitemaps including the differences between XML sitemaps vs HTML sitemaps and the advantages of using a sitemap plugin over the core WordPress feature.

At the end, we’ll also share some important details for multilingual WordPress websites looking to use a sitemap plugin to create a multilingual XML sitemap.

XML Sitemap vs HTML Sitemap: Which Do You Want?

Before we get to the sitemap plugins, it’s essential that you understand the differences between XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps:

• XML sitemaps – these provide a full map of your site’s content to search engines. Human visitors will not ever see it on your regular website.
• HTML sitemaps – these are primarily designed to help human visitors navigate your site. They can also have a secondary benefit of helping search engines crawl your site, but the primary focus is on human visitors.

Every single website needs an XML sitemap because it helps search engines understand your site’s content, which is why the core WordPress feature creates an XML sitemap for your site. 

However, creating an HTML sitemap is 100% optional and many sites nowadays do not offer an HTML sitemap.

Here’s an example of an XML sitemap:

And here’s an example of an HTML sitemap from Apple:

In this post, we’re primarily focused on WordPress sitemap plugins that help you work with your site’s XML sitemap

Why Use WordPress Sitemap Plugins Over the Built-In Feature?

As we mentioned above, WordPress added a core XML sitemap feature in version 5.5, released in August 2020.

So – if WordPress already offers a built-in feature for XML sitemaps, why would you need to install a separate sitemap plugin on your site?

Here are a few reasons why you might want a dedicated WordPress XML sitemap plugin…

Support for More Content Types

To more fully organize your site’s content and provide helpful information to Google, you might want to create dedicated sitemaps for certain content types such as images, videos, etc.

For example, if video is an important part of your website, Google says this

Creating a video sitemap is a good way to help Google find and understand the video content on your site, especially content that was recently added or that we might not otherwise discover with our usual crawling mechanisms. Google recommends using video sitemaps.

The core WordPress sitemap feature does not let you create a dedicated video sitemap, but some of the WordPress sitemap plugins on this list do.

Beyond videos, you also might want to create separate sitemaps for images and news (if you want to be listed in Google News). Here’s what Google says about these sitemaps:

• Image sitemaps – “Image sitemaps are a good way of telling Google about other images on your site, especially those that we might not otherwise find”
• News sitemaps – “If you are a news publisher, use news sitemaps to tell Google about your news articles and additional information about them…creating a separate sitemap just for your news articles may enable better tracking of your content in Search via Search Console”

More Control Over Content Exclusions

You might have some content that you don’t want to be included in your sitemap. 

A dedicated sitemap plugin can let you exclude that content, whereas the core sitemap feature doesn’t offer an option for this.

Typically, you’ll get options to exclude individual pieces of content, categories of content, entire post types, and so on.

Support for HTML Sitemaps

Again, the core WordPress feature only creates an XML sitemap. 

So if you also want to create an HTML sitemap, you’ll definitely want a dedicated WordPress HTML sitemap plugin to help you with that.

How to Choose the Best Sitemap Plugin for WordPress

Here are some quick tips to help you choose the best WordPress sitemap plugin for your sites:

• Type of sitemap – while some plugins support both XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps, others will only focus on a single type of sitemap.
• Support for content – for XML sitemaps, you might be looking for support for specific types of content. For example, if video is an important part of your strategy, you’ll want a plugin that lets you create a video sitemap. And if you’re a news publisher, you’ll definitely want to be able to create a dedicated news sitemap.
• Multilingual integrations – if you’re creating a multilingual website, you’ll want to make sure that your chosen translation plugin can help you set up a multilingual XML sitemap. For example, the TranslatePress plugin automatically integrates with many of the plugins on this list – more on that later.
• Scope of functionality – many of these plugins are full-service SEO plugins that also include sitemap functionality. For most sites, this is the best option. However, you can also find standalone sitemap plugins that only focus on XML and/or HTML sitemaps, without any other SEO features.

Seven Best WordPress Sitemap Plugins

Now that you better understand WordPress sitemaps and why you might want to use a dedicated WordPress sitemap plugin, let’s dig into the top options.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is the most popular full-service WordPress SEO plugin. It helps you implement a range of different features to boost your site’s rankings, including robust support for XML sitemaps.

Key features (free version):

• Integrates with TranslatePress to create a multilingual XML sitemap
• Creates separate sitemaps for posts, pages, categories, and authors
• Includes images in sitemap
• Automatically remove content from sitemap if you mark it as noindex
• Adds last modified property

Key features (paid versions):

• Video sitemaps
• News sitemaps

Price: Yoast SEO has a free version at WordPress.org that will be fine for most sites. If you want video sitemaps or news sitemaps, you’ll need to purchase Yoast SEO Premium for $99, as well as an extra extension for video SEO ($79) and/or news SEO ($79).

2. Rank Math

Rank Math is another all-purpose SEO plugin that’s rapidly grown in popularity to become almost as well-known as Yoast SEO. In addition to all of the other SEO features that it offers, Rank Math also has robust support for WordPress sitemaps.

In addition to creating a customizable XML sitemap, Rank Math also offers a tool to create an HTML sitemap for your site.

Key features (free version):

• Integrates with TranslatePress to create a multilingual XML sitemap
• Option to include images in your existing XML sitemap
• Choose which post types to include in your sitemap, including support for custom post types
• Choose which taxonomies to include in sitemaps
• Automatically remove content from sitemap if you mark it as noindex
• Option to create an HTML sitemap – manually place it using a shortcode or create a dedicated page

Key features (paid version):

• Video sitemaps
• News sitemaps

You can activate RankMath’s sitemap feature from the dashboard like this:

You will then be able to go under Sitemap Settings to change the configuration.

Price: Rank Math has a free version at WordPress.org that will be fine for most sites. If you want access to the ability to create video sitemaps and/or news sitemaps, you’ll need to purchase Rank Math Pro starting at $69 for use on unlimited personal websites.

3. XML Sitemap Generator for Google

While the previous two plugins are full SEO plugins with strong sitemap functionality, the XML Sitemap Generator for Google plugin is specifically focused on just XML sitemaps.

It helps you create a variety of different sitemap types and it’s 100% free. So if you want to be able to create a video and/or news sitemap without needing to pay for a premium extension, this could be a great one to consider.

Key features

• Content sitemaps, including posts and pages as well as full support for custom post types
• Video sitemaps
• News sitemaps
• Rules to include and/or exclude certain content
• Options to adjust frequency and priority
• Manually include pages in your sitemap (e.g. if you created a separate page that doesn’t use WordPress)
• Option to customize sitemap URL
• Automatically notify search engines when you publish a new post

Price: The XML Sitemap Generator for Google plugin is 100% free.

4. WP Sitemap Page

Whereas the previous plugins are primarily focused on creating XML sitemaps, WP Sitemap Page instead focuses on helping you create an HTML sitemap.

If you specifically want a solution to automatically create an HTML sitemap, this could be a good one to use.

Key features

• Automatically create an HTML sitemap of some/all of your content
• Use dynamic tags to control the display of your HTML sitemap links (screenshot below)
• Exclude content by specific pages, post types, taxonomies, and more
• Embed your HTML sitemap using a shortcode
• Use shortcode parameters to only include specific content – you can filter by post type, category, tag, author, and more

Price: The WP Sitemap Page plugin is 100% free.

5. All In One SEO

As the name suggests, All In One SEO is another full-service WordPress SEO plugin in the same vein as Yoast SEO and Rank Math. In addition to all of its other SEO features, All In One SEO offers detailed support for WordPress sitemaps.

Like Rank Math, All In One SEO can help you create both a customizable XML sitemap, as well as an HTML sitemap.

Key features (free version):

• Integrates with TranslatePress to create a multilingual XML sitemap
• Choose which post types to include in your sitemap, including custom post types
• Include images in your sitemap
• Choose which taxonomies to include in your sitemap
• Option to include date and author archives in sitemap
• Manually add external pages from outside your WordPress site
• Manually exclude specific posts/pages or content in certain categories
• Automatically remove content from sitemap if you mark it as noindex
• Option to create an HTML sitemap – you can set up a dedicated page or manually embed it using a block, shortcode, widget, or PHP function

Key features (paid version):

• Video sitemaps
• News sitemaps (including a dedicated Google News integration)

Price: All In One SEO has a free version at WordPress.org that will be fine for most sites. If you want access to the ability to create video sitemaps and/or news sitemaps, you’ll need to purchase at least the All In One SEO Pro license, which costs $499 (discounted to $199.60 for the first year).

Because it’s so expensive, you’ll probably only want to purchase this if you specifically need some of the other advanced features that the plugin offers.

6. XML Sitemap & Google News

Unlike the other plugins that offer an all-purpose approach to XML sitemaps, the XML Sitemap & Google News plugin is specifically focused on helping you create an XML sitemap for news content that follows the Google News Sitemap protocol.

If you’re looking for a free way to create a Google News-compatible sitemap, it can be a good option. However, if you want a more all-around sitemap tool, you’ll want to choose a different plugin.

Key features (free version):

• Sitemap Index includes posts, pages and authors by default.
• Optionally include sitemaps for custom post types, categories and tags.
• Sitemap with custom URLs optional.
• Custom/static sitemaps can be added to the index.
• Works out-of-the-box, even on Multisite installations.
• Include featured images or attached images with title.
• Pings sitemap to Google & Yandex on new post publication.
• Options to define which post types and taxonomies get included in the sitemap.
• Updates Lastmod on post modification or on comments.
• Set Priority per post type, per taxonomy and per individual post.
• Exclude individual posts and pages.
• Required news sitemap tags: Publication name, language, title and publication date.
• Set a News Publication Name or uses site name.
• Supports custom post types.
• Limit inclusion to certain post categories.
• Pings Google on new publications, once per 5 minutes.

Key features (paid version):

• Multiple post types – Include more than one post type in the same News Sitemap.
• Keywords – Add the keywords tag to your News Sitemap. Keywords can be created from Tags, Categories or a dedicated Keywords taxonomy.
• Stock tickers – Add stock tickers tag to your News Sitemap. A dedicated Stock Tickers taxonomy will be available to manage them.

Price: The plugin has a free version that should work for most sites. There’s also an advanced version that starts at ~$29 and supports multiple post types, keyword tags, stock tickers, and a ping log.

7. SEOPress

Finally, we have SEOPress, another all-in-one WordPress SEO plugin with strong sitemap functionality. Like Rank Math and All In One SEO, it can help you work with both XML and HTML sitemaps.

Key features (free version):

• Integrates with TranslatePress to create a multilingual XML sitemap
• Choose which post types to include in sitemap
• Choose which taxonomies to include in sitemap
• Automatically remove content from sitemap if you mark it as noindex
• Create an image sitemap
• Option to add an author sitemap
• Option to create an HTML sitemap that you can embed anywhere using a block or shortcode

Key features (paid version):

• Google News XML sitemap
• Video sitemap

Price: SEOPress has a free version at WordPress.org that will be fine for most sites. If you want access to the ability to create video sitemaps and/or news sitemaps, the premium version costs $49 for use on unlimited sites, which makes it the cheapest all-purpose SEO plugin on this list.

XML Sitemaps for Multilingual Sites – Let TranslatePress Do It For You

If you want to create a multilingual WordPress website and offer your content in multiple languages, it’s important that you set up a multilingual XML sitemap.

Not only does the multilingual sitemap include all of your translated content, but it also uses hreflang tags to help search engines understand how content from different languages connects.

For example, adding hreflang tags can tell Google “This is the English-language version of Post A and this is the Spanish-language version of Post A”. 

By helping Google understand that it’s the same content (just in different languages), Google can make sure to serve the right version to searches based on the searchers’ chosen languages. If you implement other multilingual SEO best practices, you’ll give your translated content a great chance to rank in search engines.

If you use the TranslatePress plugin to create your multilingual website, TranslatePress automatically integrates with many of the sitemap plugins on this list to create a multilingual sitemap.

Here is the current list of sitemap plugins that TranslatePress integrates with via the TranslatePress SEO Pack Addon:

• Yoast SEO
• Rank Math
• All In One SEO
• SEOPress

You can access the TranslatePress SEO Pack Addon with any premium version of the plugin, starting at just €89 for unlimited languages and unlimited translation. Purchase your TranslatePress license today to get started.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress multilingual plugin that also lets you create a multilingual XML sitemap with hreflang tags.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Create Your WordPress Sitemap Today

Ever since WordPress 5.5 in August 2020, WordPress has offered a built-in XML sitemap feature. However, a lot of webmasters still prefer using dedicated WordPress sitemap plugins because they give you more control and functionality.

Pretty much any WordPress SEO plugin will have a flexible sitemap feature, but you can also find dedicated WordPress sitemap plugins for XML and/or HTML sitemaps.

If you want to create a multilingual XML sitemap, you can use the TranslatePress plugin and its SEO Pack Addon. 

TranslatePress not only lets you translate all of the content on your site, but it can also automatically create an XML sitemap for your multilingual content when paired with many of the plugins on this list.

If you’re ready to get started with your WordPress site’s multilingual sitemap, purchase TranslatePress today.

The post 7 Best WordPress Sitemap Plugins for Multilingual Sites appeared first on TranslatePress.

If you’re serious about connecting with a multilingual audience, having your site professionally translated can be a good investment to create the best experience for your visitors and help you achieve your business goals.

But at the same time, professional translation projects can also be a little bit more involved than less serious projects, so you’ll want to make sure you’re covering all your bases to get the best results.

In this post, you’re going to learn everything that you need to know about having your website professionally translated, including:

• Learning how professional translation software, automatic translation tools, and human professional translation services fit into your project.
• How to prepare for a professional translation project.
• How to implement your professional translation project for a WordPress site.

Let’s dig in!

What Goes Into Professional Website Translation?

If you want to professionally translate your website, you’ll typically want to consider three elements:

• Automatic machine translation services – while you won’t want to rely exclusively on automatic translation, machine translation services can play a role in a professional project to speed things up and reduce costs. However, you’ll still want to have any automatic translations professionally reviewed.
• Professional translation software – website translation software is essential for helping you manage and maintain your translations, as well as serving up your site’s translations based on a user’s chosen language. If you’re using WordPress, you can find professional WordPress translation plugins, while other types of websites might need to rely on SaaS translation tools.
• Human translation services/freelancers – to ensure high-quality translations, you’ll want to have a professional human translator involved, whether that’s a dedicated translation service or a freelance translator. You can have the professional translator create your site’s translations from scratch or have them review/edit machine translations.

How to Prepare to Professionally Translate Your Website

Now that you understand the important pieces of professional website translation, let’s start digging into some more actionable tips on how to professionally translate your website.

To make this as useful as possible, we’ll divide these tips into two sections:

1. How to prepare to translate your website professionally.
2. How to implement your professional website translation.

In this section, we’re focused on the preparation steps that you’ll want to perform before you get into translating any content on your site.

Research Which Languages to Add to Your Site

Before you get into any more advanced steps, you first need to choose which languages you want to use on your site.

Based on intuition, you probably have a pretty good idea of which languages to offer. For example, if you want to expand your business into Spain, it’s pretty obvious that you’ll want to add a Spanish-language version of your site.

However, if your business doesn’t have defined geographic targets – e.g. it’s a content website or a global services website – it might be a little tougher to choose which languages to offer.

In these situations, you might want to dig into the data to choose the best languages for your site. For example, if you’re using Google Analytics, you can look at the Demographic Details report to see which countries your visitors are browsing from.

Choose Whether or Not to Use Automatic Translation

As we mentioned above, you shouldn’t rely exclusively on automatic translation services if you want to professionally translate your website.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t use automatic translation as an aid to help you implement your project more efficiently.

For example, instead of hiring professional translation services to translate all of your website’s content from scratch, you could instead use an automatic service to generate your site’s baseline translations and then just have those automatic translations professionally edited and refined by an experienced translator.

Using this approach might be able to save you time and speed up your project.

On the other hand, if you want to ensure the highest quality, most natural-sounding translations, you could opt to have a human translate everything from scratch. The downside, of course, is that this will cost you more money and likely take more time.

Find Relevant Professional Translation Services

Next, you’ll need to research professional translation services to find one that fits your needs.

If you’re using automatic translation, this could be a service to review and edit your translations. Or, if you’re skipping automatic translation, you would need a service to translate your content from scratch.

If you want the smoothest experience and you’re willing to pay for it, you can go with a true professional translation service. These are typically full agencies that have entire teams. Depending on the size of your project, you might even get a dedicated account manager.

We have a post on the best translation companies to help you find some good options.

If you want to save some money, you can consider working with a freelance translator instead. A skilled freelancer can offer just as high-quality translations, though you’ll likely need to take on more of the project management-related tasks. You’ll also need to do more work to vet the quality of your chosen freelancer.

If you’re interested in using a freelance translator, we have a post with the six best marketplaces to hire freelance translators.

Select Professional Translation Software for Your Website

Hiring professional translation services can help you translate your content. But to actually manage those translations, you’ll also need some professional translation software.

Quality translation software typically offers the following features, at a bare minimum:

• An interface to manage the translations for all of the content on your site.
• Options to integrate automatic translation services, if you want to use them.
• Tools to manage access to your site’s translations, which is important if you’re working with services or freelancers.

Beyond features, you’ll also obviously need the software to be compatible with the content management system that you used to build your website.

If you used the popular WordPress software to build your site, you can use a WordPress translation plugin like TranslatePress to handle everything.

TranslatePress offers an easy way to manage the translations for unlimited languages using a visual, point-and-click editor like this:

At the same time, it also includes features to help you integrate automatic translation services and work with professional translation services. For example, you can connect to Google Translate or DeepL for automatic translation and create dedicated translator accounts to work with translation companies or freelancers.

In the next section, you’ll learn how to professionally translate your WordPress website using TranslatePress.

If you’re not using WordPress for your site, you might want to check out our post with the best translation management software for non-WordPress sites.

How to Perform Professional Website Translation

Once you’ve prepared for your translation project, you can jump into actually translating your website.

For this guide, we’re only going to assume two things:

1. You’re using the massively popular WordPress software to build your site.
2. You’ve already added all of your site’s content in your original language.

Other than those assumptions, we’ll take you through every step you need to take to implement your professional website translation project.

1. Install the TranslatePress Plugin On Your Site

To get started, you’ll want to install the TranslatePress plugin on your site. 

Again, TranslatePress is the professional translation software that will help you integrate human or machine translation services into your website, manage all of your translated content, and more.

While there is a free version of TranslatePress that you can use to translate your site, we’re going to recommend that you purchase the Business license for a professional project. Here’s why:

1. You can create dedicated “Translator” accounts that you can share with professional translation services. That way, services can easily access your site to translate your content, but they won’t be able to access any other parts of your site.
2. You can translate your site into unlimited new languages. With the free version, you can only add one new language to your site, which might not be enough for professional projects.
3. You can use Google Translate or DeepL for automatic translation. If you want to use machine translation as part of your project, DeepL can offer more accurate translations for certain language pairs.
4. You can implement multilingual SEO, which helps ensure that your translated content ranks high in Google.

You can also get lots of other helpful features, such as the ability to automatically redirect users to their preferred languages.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress translation plugin to implement professional website translation on your WordPress site.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

2. Add the Languages That You Want to Use

Once you’ve activated the TranslatePress plugin, you’ll next want to choose which languages you want to add to your site:

1. Open your WordPress dashboard.
2. Go to Settings → TranslatePress.
3. Use the options to add one or more new languages to your site.
4. Make sure to save your settings.

3. Enable Automatic Translation (Optional)

This next step is optional. But if you do want to use automatic translation from Google Translate or DeepL, you’ll want to set that up now.

You can enable automatic translation for either service by going to the Automatic Translation tab in the TranslatePress settings area.

If you’re looking to offer your site in European languages, we generally recommend DeepL as a great option as it usually offers the highest quality translations for those languages.

For other languages, you might want to consider Google Translate, as Google Translate is still pretty accurate and offers much broader language coverage as compared to DeepL.

If you’re interested in setting up automatic translation, these posts can help:

• Google Translate documentation
• DeepL documentation
• How to automatically translate WordPress with Google Translate
• How to automatically translate WordPress with DeepL

4. Set Up Translator Accounts for Professional Translation Services

If you want to work with one of the many professional translation services or freelancers out there, you’ll need a way to give them access to your site’s translations.

With some professional translation software, you need to work via .po files. You would send the .po file to the service, they would return it to you, and then you would apply it to your site.

One of the nice things about TranslatePress, though, is that you can let translators work directly on your site via the same visual interface that you can access.

Here’s how to set it up…

Install the Translator Accounts Add-On

To start, you’ll want to install the TranslatePress Translator Accounts add-on:

1. Purchase at least the TranslatePress Business license, if you haven’t done so already.
2. Go to the Addons tab in the TranslatePress settings area (Settings → TranslatePress).
3. Click Activate next to the Translator Accounts add-on.

Create As Many Translator Accounts As Needed

Once you’ve activated the add-on, here’s how to create a translator account:

1. Go to Users → Add New in your WordPress dashboard (the regular WordPress user management interface).
2. Fill out the basic profile details – username, email address, etc.
3. Set the Role drop-down equal to Translator.
4. Click the Add New User button.
5. Share the account details with your translator. They should also receive an email, unless you uncheck the Send User Notification box.

Depending on your preferences, you could create a single account for the translation service to use. Or, you could create separate accounts for each individual translator in the team, which might be helpful for very large translation projects.

Translators Can Log in Via the WordPress Login Page

Once you share the account details with your translator(s), they can log in using the default WordPress login page, which is yoursite.com/wp-login.php. If you’ve created a custom login form, translators can also log in using that page.

Once the translator is logged in, they can visit any page on your site and click the Translate Page option on the toolbar to launch the visual translation editor for that page.

Don’t worry – translators will only have access to the translation interface. They will not be able to access any other parts of your WordPress dashboard.

If you want to make any of your own edits to your site’s translations, you can also access the translation editor from your own WordPress account.

5. Wait for the Translation Service to Work

Once you’ve shared the translator accounts with your chosen translation service or freelancer, you just need to sit back while they do the work of adding and/or editing your site’s translations.

With TranslatePress, they’ll be able to work directly on your site. That means that, as soon as they finish the work, your translations will be live right away. There’s no need for you to upload any files or do any extra work.

6. Go Live With Your Professionally Translated Website

Your site’s translations will be live as soon as the translation service adds them via the interface.

As long as there’s a translation for a piece of content, your site’s visitors will be able to switch languages using the language switcher.

By default, this language switcher appears as a floating option in the bottom-right corner. However, TranslatePress gives you lots of options to customize this – check out our post on how to add a WordPress language switcher for more details.

If you’re using the TranslatePress Business license, you also have the option to automatically redirect users to their preferred languages using the Automatic User Language Detection add-on.

Get Started With Professional Website Translation Today

Professional website translation is key for serious websites with multilingual audiences.

While professionally translating your website is a little bit more involved than more casual translation methods, it’s worth it to ensure that your visitors have optimal experiences no matter which languages they’re browsing in.

If you built your website with WordPress, the TranslatePress plugin is an excellent option for professional translation software.

With TranslatePress, you can easily connect with professional translation services or freelancers by creating dedicated translator accounts for them.

You can have web translation services translate your content from scratch. Or, you can also generate your site’s baseline translations using Google Translate or DeepL and have the service edit and refine those translations.

If you want to try it out, TranslatePress offers a free version at WordPress.org that you can test.

However, we recommend purchasing the TranslatePress Business license for professional website translation because it adds several key features including the following:

• Dedicated translator accounts to share with services or freelancers
• Tools to optimize your translated content for search engines
• Support for unlimited languages
• DeepL support for automatic translation
• The option to automatically redirect visitors to their preferred languages

To get started, purchase the TranslatePress Business license today.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress translation plugin to implement professional website translation on your WordPress site.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

The post How to Conduct Professional Website Translation Using Web Translation Services appeared first on TranslatePress.

While these two plugins aren’t the only quality WordPress translation plugins, they are two of the most popular options.

As such, you might be struggling to choose between WPML and Polylang.

To help you make the right choice, we’re going to objectively compare these two plugins in a few key areas:

• Translation options – beyond manual translation, what other options do you have? E.g. automatic translation, professional translation services, and so on.
• Translation interfaces and user-friendliness – what’s it like to manage your site’s translations?
• Translation completeness – are you able to translate 100% of your site’s data? What about content from other WordPress plugins? Backend SEO metadata? Images? Etc.
• SEO-friendliness – can you rank your translated content in Google and other search engines?
• Pricing – how much does it cost to create an effective multilingual website?

After we cover our detailed Polylang vs WPML comparison, we’ll also share a third alternative that you might want to consider (TranslatePress), as well as how TranslatePress stacks up in the same areas.

Let’s dig in!

Polylang vs WPML Translation Options

To kick things off, let’s go over the options that Polylang and WPML offer when it comes to translating your site’s content.

Manual Translation

To kick things off, both Polylang and WPML let you manually translate your content.

With Polylang, manual translation is pretty much the sole focus. 

With WPML, however, manual translation is just one option you have in your toolbelt.

Automatic Translation

If you want to use automatic machine translation, WPML has a big advantage over Polylang.

With WPML, you can automatically translate your entire site or individual pieces of content using your choice of three different machine translation services:

• DeepL Translator
• Google Translate
• Microsoft Azure Translator

Polylang, on the other hand, does not support automatic translation in the core plugin. If you use Polylang by itself, your only option is manual translation.

With that being said, there are ways to add automatic translation to Polylang with third-party plugins. Most notably, Ray Enterprise Translation (formerly known as Lingotek Translation).

However, since rebranding from Lingotek Translation to Ray Enterprise Translation, the plugin’s reviews are not very good and some users report issues integrating it with Polylang.

Overall, if you want to use automatic translation, WPML is most likely a better option than Polylang. Or, you might want to consider other translation plugins like TranslatePress, which supports Google Translate and DeepL – more on that later.

Professional Translation Services

Beyond manually translating your content, you also might consider using a professional translation service or a freelance translator.

Here again, WPML surpasses Polylang (and most other translation plugins).

WPML offers dedicated integrations with a number of professional translation services – you can find a full list here.

If you use one of these services, you can send your content for translation right from your WordPress dashboard. Once the service translates your content, they can also add the translations right to your site, which saves you from needing to manually do it.

As with automatic translation, Polylang does not have any built-in support for integrating with professional translation services. 

The same Ray Enterprise Translation plugin from above can also help with connecting with professional services. But again, you’d be relying on a third-party tool that has been receiving a lot of negative reviews since its rebranding.

Polylang vs WPML Translation Interfaces and User Friendliness

Next, let’s go over the interfaces in Polylang vs WPML. That is, what it’s actually like to use both plugins to translate your content.

Both plugins require you to manage your translations in multiple different interfaces. While it’s not very convenient to do that, it’s also not a huge deal once you get the hang of things.

Let’s go through the different options to manage your translations…

Polylang

Note – we’re using the premium version of Polylang for these screenshots. You might not have all of these options in the free version. More on pricing later.

To translate the content of an individual piece of content, Polylang essentially just creates a duplicate of the WordPress editor for each language.

There’s nothing connecting the actual content together on the backend. The posts are associated in a general sense – but it’s not like you’ll see a side-by-side comparison of the original content and the translated content (this will make more sense once you see WPML).

To start, you’ll open the editor for the existing piece of content that you want to translate. Then, you can click the “plus” icon next to the language version that you want to create:

This will launch a new version of the WordPress editor for that language version. You can now add your translated content from scratch.

Polylang will also integrate with some, but not all, plugins to let you translate content in a similar way.

To translate other content on your site – e.g. non-supported plugin content, theme strings, menus, widgets, and so on – you’ll work from a separate string translation interface that you can access by going to Languages → Translations.

While this interface is easy enough to use, it can feel a bit overwhelming if you have a large site (though the filters can help you focus on specific content).

WPML

With WPML, you’ll also work from different interfaces depending on the content that you want to translate.

To translate individual pieces of content, you can choose from two different editing experiences:

• Advanced Translation Editor (recommended) – this is a custom interface that gives you a side-by-side view to manage translations. This is also where you can access automatic machine translation.
• Classic Translation Editor – this lets you work very similarly to Polylang, in that you basically get a duplicate of the native WordPress editor for each piece of content. Or, you can also use a slightly different version of the side-by-side editor.

Here’s what the Advanced Translation Editor looks like:

And here’s what the Classic Translation Editor looks like when you choose to use the WordPress editor instead of WPML’s editor:

However, to manage the translations for other types of content on your site – theme strings, plugin strings, menus, etc. – you’ll often work from different interfaces.

If a plugin uses custom post types, you might be able to work from a similar interface. For example, if you were using The Events Calendar, you could use the same Advanced Translation Editor to translate the title and description of your events.

However, to translate plugin strings from outside the editor, you’ll need to use the separate string translation interface.

For example, here’s what it looks like to translate the strings from the WPForms plugin:

There’s also a separate interface to translate taxonomies:

One nice thing about WPML is that it also gives you an overall translation management interface that lets you see the translation status of all the content on your site.

Having this flexibility gives WPML an advantage over Polylang because you’re able to choose the editing experience that works for you. 

However, because there are so many different areas to manage translations, it can also feel a bit overwhelming when you’re just getting started.

Polylang vs WPML Translation Completeness

Beyond having a user-friendly way to manage your site’s translations, it’s also important that your chosen translation plugin can help you create comprehensive translations.

Your WordPress site will have content coming from a lot of different places. Here are some examples:

• Text content from the native WordPress editor (Block editor or Classic editor).
• Text content from your theme.
• Images.
• Videos.
• Frontend content from plugins (e.g. a page builder plugin, WooCommerce, a membership plugin, and so on).
• Backend content/metadata from plugins (e.g. the SEO title and meta description from your SEO plugin).
• URL slugs.
• Shortcodes and shortcode output.
• Taxonomies (categories, tags, etc.)
• Etc.

If you want to create a completely localized multilingual experience for your site’s visitors, you need a tool that lets you translate everything.

Polylang and WPML generally support comprehensive translations, but it’s not always straightforward.

Oftentimes, you’ll need to rely on the string translation interfaces to access content like text strings from plugins, which isn’t the most user-friendly way to manage things.

In some cases, you might need to install an integration plugin to improve translation capability. 

Or, in rare cases, you might need to manually define certain strings, which can happen if the plugin developer isn’t following WordPress coding conventions.

If you’re worried about this, WPML maintains a directory of plugins that are confirmed to be compatible with WPML. Polylang doesn’t have as centralized a database, which can make it a little more difficult to assess compatibility.

There is a category on the Polylang site for plugin and theme compatibility, but you’ll largely need to test things yourself.

If you want to avoid plugin compatibility issues, you might want to choose a translation plugin that looks at your site’s rendered content to manage translations. This makes it much easier to ensure comprehensive translations when it comes to content from plugins, shortcode output, etc.

Popular options that use this approach include TranslatePress and Weglot – more on this later.

Polylang vs WPML SEO Friendliness

If you want to implement an international SEO strategy and have your site benefit from multilingual SEO, it’s important that your chosen multilingual plugin can help you implement SEO best practices.

Here’s a quick rundown on important SEO considerations for Polylang and WPML – you won’t notice any major differences either way:

Polylang vs WPML Pricing

If you have an unlimited budget, you might not care about pricing. But for most people, the cost of each plugin will be another important factor when it comes to a WPML vs Polylang comparison.

First off, one big difference is that Polylang has a free version, whereas WPML only comes in a premium version.

So if you’re looking for a free WordPress translation plugin, that instantly shifts things in Polylang’s favor (though you can find other quality free translation plugins like TranslatePress).

When it comes to the premium versions, WPML is generally a bit cheaper for most use cases, though the price will be similar if you only have a single site and you’re not running a WooCommerce store.

Let’s go through the paid plans…

Polylang Premium Versions

The core Polylang Pro plugin starts at €99 for use on a single site, with prices going up if you need licenses for multiple websites.

This is all that most sites will need to pay. However, if you’re creating a multilingual WooCommerce store, you’ll also want to purchase Polylang for WooCommerce. Polylang for WooCommerce also starts at €99 for use on a single site.

You can also access both Polylang Pro and Polylang for WooCommerce via the Polylang Business Pack, which starts at €139 for use on a single site. 

WPML Premium Versions

WPML, on the other hand, offers three different license options. There are three types of differences between the plans:

• Features – the cheapest plan has a limited feature set and it’s not an option for most serious use cases.
• Automatic translation credits – on the higher two licenses, you get a different number of automatic translation credits. More on those next.
• Supported websites – each plan lets you use the plugin on a different number of websites, with the highest tier supporting unlimited websites.

Here’s a screenshot of the three different plans, along with the feature differences between them.

While the Multilingual Blog plan does start at just $39, you’ll want at least the $99 Multilingual CMS plan for any serious use case.

The Multilingual Agency plan doesn’t add any new features, but it does give you more translation credits, along with support for unlimited websites. Polylang does not have an unlimited site license, so this might be one big advantage if you’re using WPML in an agency setting.

Automatic Translation Costs

In addition to the plugins themselves, you also might need to pay for your site’s automatic translation usage, if you want to utilize automatic translation.

This applies to WPML directly, and it might apply to Polylang if you’re using a third-party plugin to add automatic translation support (such as the Ray Enterprise Translation plugin that we mentioned).

With WPML’s Multilingual CMS and Multilingual Agency plans, you get a certain number of credits for free with your purchase

Each word that you translate will cost a certain number of credits, depending on the service:

• DeepL (default) – two credits per word
• Google Translate – two credits per word
• Microsoft Azure Translator – one credit per word

In addition to the large one-time number of credits that you get with your purchase, you also get 2,000 free credits per month for as long as you have an active WPML license.

If you need to exceed the free credits that come with your license, you can utilize pay-as-you-go pricing or purchase prepaid credits in advance (which never expire).

• Pay-as-you-go pricing – after the 2,000 free credits, the next 8,000 credits cost $0.75 per 1,000 credits. The price per 1,000 credits goes down based on volume, bottoming out at $0.10 per 1,000 credits if you’re using 10+ million credits per month.
• Prepaid credits – you can save some money by purchasing prepaid credits that never expire. These cost $50 for 40,000 credits or $180 for 200,000 credits.

With Polylang, the automatic translation cost will depend on your solution. However, you should almost certainly budget some money for it if you plan to use automatic translation.

Final Thoughts on WPML vs Polylang

Overall, while both Polylang and WPML have their own strong points, WPML probably makes a better option for more serious multilingual websites for two main reasons:

1. It gives you more options for translating your content – manual, automatic, or professional service integrations. 
2. It gives you more flexibility when it comes to the interface that you use to translate your content, which lets you choose the experience that best matches your workflows.

The downside, however, is that WPML doesn’t have a free version. So if keeping costs down is paramount to you, you still might want to go with Polylang because it has a functional free version.

Of course, WPML and Polylang are not the only two options to create a multilingual WordPress site, so you also might want to consider other plugins to translate your site.

TranslatePress: Another Alternative to WPML and Polylang

Our main goal in this Polylang vs WPML comparison is to help you choose between these two plugins. We tried to honestly highlight the pros and cons of each tool to help you pick the right one for your situation.

However, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own plugin – TranslatePress – because we think TranslatePress can be a great alternative to both WPML and Polylang for a lot of sites.

TranslatePress was built from the ground up to create the most user-friendly experience for creating a multilingual WordPress site:

• You can manage your translations using a visual, point-and-click interface.
• TranslatePress offers 100% translation completeness – you can translate WordPress content themes, plugins, and more. You also don’t need to look for any special compatibility – it just works with pretty much any plugin out there.
• You can choose between manual translation or automatic translation (or a mix of both).

Let’s take a quick look at how TranslatePress stacks up in the same categories that we compared WPML vs Polylang.

Translation Options

TranslatePress supports both manual translation and automatic translation via Google Translate or DeepL. 

You can also create dedicated translator accounts to help you work with translation agencies or freelancers, though there aren’t any dedicated integrations like WPML offers.

You can also mix and match the two different approaches. For example, you could generate your site’s baseline translations with DeepL but then manually review and edit those translations (or hire someone to do it for you).

Translation Interface and User Friendliness

To let you manage your translations, TranslatePress offers a unique visual, point-and-click editor that’s different from both WPML and Polylang.

When you open the translation editor, you’ll see a live preview of your site and a sidebar, much like the native WordPress theme customizer.

To translate any element on your site, all you need to do is hover over that element and click the pencil icon. That will open the translation in the sidebar, where you can make your changes.

You can use this same point-and-click approach for text from WordPress, plugins, and themes, as well as other elements like images, widgets, menus, and more.

With Polylang and WPML, you would need to use separate interfaces to accomplish the same thing, which can make TranslatePress more convenient if you need to translate different types of content.

Translation Completeness

Another advantage that TranslatePress has is translation completeness.

TranslatePress detects translatable content in a completely different way from WPML and Polylang, which helps it offer out-of-the-box support for pretty much any WordPress plugin and theme.

WPML and Polylang look at the content in your site’s database to find content to translate. This works most of the time, but it can cause issues if a plugin or theme isn’t following WordPress conventions or has some other quirks.

For example, this is why you’ll see “Compatible with WPML” on a lot of plugins.

Rather than using this approach, TranslatePress looks at the rendered HTML on your site to find content to translate. This lets TranslatePress help you translate pretty much any content that appears on your site, regardless of where that content comes from or how it’s stored in your site’s database.

For example, this approach also lets TranslatePress easily translate shortcode output, popups, and other more edge-case situations that other translation plugins can struggle with.

Here’s what it looks like to translate a form from WPForms – there’s no need to install a compatibility plugin or scan for strings; all you do is point and click on the visual preview:

Here are posts demonstrating how you can apply this point-and-click approach to all different types of WordPress content.

• Images
• Editor (Gutenberg) blocks
• Custom fields
• Custom post types
• WordPress forms
• WordPress menus
• Popup content
• Sliders
• WooCommerce products
• Elementor (page builder)
• Divi (page builder)

Overall, we think that TranslatePress’s approach offers the easiest way to ensure comprehensive translations.

TranslatePress SEO Friendliness

With the SEO Pack add-on (available on all paid TranslatePress plans), you get a number of features to help with multilingual SEO.

One thing to note, however, is that TranslatePress exclusively uses the subfolder approach. It doesn’t give you the option to use subdomains or separate domains like both WPML and Polylang offer.

While we think the subfolder approach is the best option for most sites, this might be an important consideration for you if you need to use subdomains or separate domains for some reason.

Pricing

TranslatePress comes in both a free version at WordPress.org as well as three different premium plans.

In general, the free version is more functional than Polylang’s free version. For example, the free version of TranslatePress still supports automatic translation via Google Translate and offers more comprehensive translations.

However, one limitation is that the free version of TranslatePress only supports one new language, while Polylang’s free version supports unlimited languages.

Beyond adding support for unlimited language, the paid versions of TranslatePress also add other features including the following:

• Multilingual SEO – translate SEO metadata, create a multilingual sitemap, and more.
• Dedicated Translator accounts – work with freelance translators or translation services.
• Browse as user role – browse your site as specific user roles in the translation editor. 
• Navigation based on user language – while the free version lets you fully translate your menu items, the premium version lets you use different menus depending on a user’s language.
• DeepL support for automatic translation
• Automatic user language detection – automatically detect a user’s preferred language (via browser settings or location) and redirect them to the right version of your site.

Here are the pricing plans:

The Business and Developer plans are identical in terms of features – the only difference is how many sites you can activate the plugin on.

Automatic Translation Pricing

Unlike WPML, TranslatePress does not charge you anything extra to use automatic translation. However, you might need to pay Google Translate or DeepL directly if you exceed the limits on their free tiers.

Both services let you translate 500,000 characters per month for free, which is equal to around 80,000-100,000 words. After that, Google Translate costs $20 per one million characters, paid directly to Google.

This means you can translate around ~165,000-200,000 words for ~$20 with TranslatePress. Because Google Translate bills based on characters, the actual rate might be slightly higher or lower depending on your content.

For comparison, translating 200,000 words with Google Translate in WPML would cost you around $360 with prepaid credits. You would need 400,000 WPML credits to translate 200,000 words, because each word in Google Translate costs two WPML credits.

To help you control your budget, TranslatePress also lets you set limits on automatic translation usage for your site.

Pick the Right WordPress Multilingual Plugin

That wraps up our Polylang vs WPML comparison, as well as some bonus thoughts on how our TranslatePress plugin stacks up against them.

All three of these plugins have their own pros and cons, so there’s no one size fits all solution that will work for every single site.

For example, WPML lets you connect directly with professional translation services, which is something that neither Polylang nor TranslatePress offer (though TranslatePress does let you create translator accounts).

If that’s an important feature for your business, that might make WPML the best option for your site.

Similarly, Polylang’s free version lets you use unlimited languages for free, whereas TranslatePress’s free version limits you to one new language. So if you have a super tight budget and you want to offer 3+ different languages, that might make Polylang’s free version the best option.

With that being said, we wouldn’t be developing TranslatePress if we didn’t think it was the best WordPress multilingual plugin for most sites.

With a visual, point-and-click translation editor, support for manual and automatic translation (with automatic translation costing much less than WPML), and out-of-the-box compatibility with pretty much any type of WordPress content, we think TranslatePress can be a great option for most multilingual use cases.

If you want to learn more, you can read our tutorial on using TranslatePress to create a multilingual WordPress site or head to the TranslatePress homepage.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best alternative to Polylang and WPML for WordPress users who want to create a multilingual website.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

The post Polylang vs WPML: How to Choose in 2024 (+ A Great Alternative) appeared first on TranslatePress.

With a localized site, you get the chance to reach new people in search engines, social media, and all of your other marketing campaigns.

But if you want your strategy to work, you can’t just roll out the exact same marketing approach to different locales. That’s where marketing localization comes in.

With localization in marketing, you can tailor your marketing campaigns to specific regions, cultures, and languages. By optimizing your marketing strategies for different locales, you can ensure that you’re getting the best ROI from your multilingual/multiregional efforts.

In this post, we’re going to dig into localized marketing with a specific focus on businesses with a multilingual and/or multiregional website.

We’ll start with a quick introduction to marketing localization in a little more detail. Then, we’ll get into some actionable strategies that you can implement to improve your localization in marketing.

Let’s dig in!

What Is Localized Marketing?

Localized marketing is the process of tailoring your marketing strategies to more effectively market to users in different languages and/or locations.

It involves adapting all the different aspects of your marketing strategies and content to meet the unique needs of target customers who might be located in different countries, speak different languages, and/or have different cultural values.

One of the most well-known examples of localized marketing is Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, which replaces the traditional Coca-Cola logo with a person’s name and “Share a Coke With” text.

What makes this a great example of localized marketing is that Coca-Cola used different names for different locales.

For example, a Coca-Cola drinker in France would see traditionally “French” names, while a Coca-Cola drinker in Spain would see traditionally “Spanish” names. 

Example bottles in the Australia (the original country):

Example bottles in Vietnam:

In total, Coca-Cola rolled out these localized bottles in 50+ countries, each of which saw local names on the bottles.

Without this extra level of localization, the campaign would not have been nearly as effective.

When it comes to your website, one big part of marketing localization is translating your website and other marketing content into users’ local languages. 

However, marketing localization goes a lot further than just word-for-word translating your content, which is why you’ll want to follow the strategies from later in this post.

What Are the Benefits of Localization In Marketing?

If your product has a multilingual and/or multiregional audience, there are a lot of benefits to localization in marketing.

Here are some of the biggest reasons to consider implementing localized marketing for your business:

• Conversion rate optimization – if your audience comes from different locations and/or speaks different languages, you might be missing potential conversions by not localizing your marketing efforts. Surveys show that most people prefer browsing and shopping on localized websites, so you could be leaking customers by not meeting these needs.
• Increased engagement – by meeting your local customers where they are instead of forcing one strategy on all of your customers, you can increase engagement with them and build a stronger connection.
• Improved brand reputation – by investing the effort to localize your marketing content, you can boost your brand’s reputation and show people your brand is committed to that region.

Are There Any Negatives to Localized Marketing?

The main drawback of implementing a localized marketing strategy is the cost – both in terms of money and human effort.

By localizing your marketing efforts, you’re undoubtedly adding extra work to your plate.

For example, instead of creating one single marketing graphic, you might need to create a separate marketing graphic for each locale. While you probably won’t need to start from zero for each graphic, this will take some extra time to implement.

Beyond the initial implementation, it will also add extra time and effort to maintain your localized marketing efforts going forward. For example, if you change one landing page on your site, you’ll need to also adjust the localized versions of that landing page.

To make sure you’re getting a good ROI on your efforts, we recommend setting up analytics to track the effectiveness of your marketing localization – more on that later.

Seven Key Strategies for Marketing Localization

Now that you have a better understanding of what localized marketing is and why you might want to implement it, let’s get into some more actionable tips for how you can start implementing marketing localization on your own website and campaigns.

1. Understand the Difference Between Localization and Translation

If you want to implement an effective marketing localization strategy, it’s essential to understand the difference between localization and translation:

• Translation – translating your site’s content from one language to another without changing the meaning.
• Localization – adjusting your site’s content (and design) to feel like a native experience for visitors in different languages and/or locales.

For example, let’s say you have a line of text on the USA version of your site that says something like “There’s a Starbucks on every corner”.

While that line makes perfect sense to someone in the USA (where Starbucks is everywhere), it wouldn’t make as much sense if someone were browsing your site from a country where Starbucks doesn’t have a large presence.

To localize your content, you wouldn’t just translate the Starbucks references into that person’s local language. Instead, in addition to basic translation, you would also change the reference entirely to use a local cafe chain that is popular in that country.

The same holds true for date formats, currencies, number formatting, and so on.

Without understanding this key difference, you’ll struggle to create optimized localized marketing campaigns.

To learn more, you can check out our posts on what website localization is and the differences between localization vs translation.

2. Perform Market Research for Different Locales

When you launched your product in your native language/locale, you probably did some market research to understand your customers and learn how to market to them effectively.

If you want to effectively localize your marketing efforts, you’ll need to perform that same type of research for the other locales that you want to target.

In addition to general market research, you’ll want to pay special attention to any notable differences between this location and your original market:

• Formatting, currencies, units of measurement, and so on – all the nitty-gritty details
• Demographics
• Cultural values
• Any unique regional likes and dislikes
• Things that might be offensive in that region
• Etc.

Depending on how much you’re willing to invest, it might make sense to hire a local to perform this research, as they’ll intrinsically have a deeper understanding of that locale.

3. Adjust Key Marketing Content and Design for Each Language/Locale

Once you’ve performed your localized market research, the next step is to adjust all of your key marketing content for each locale.

While you’ll want to translate and localize all of the content on your site, your localized marketing strategy should put a special emphasis on the following elements:

• Prices – make sure to adjust all of the prices on your site so that they appear in a visitor’s local currency. If you have a digital product, you can also consider implementing pricing parity, which actually adjusts prices up or down based on each region’s buying power. You can implement this manually or using tools like ParityDeals.
• CTA buttons – adjust your call to action content to ensure you’re driving actions and maximizing conversions in each locale. You also might need to adjust the design, as different CTA text might shift the design around.
• Forms – make sure that every form you use is localized to optimize conversions. In some cases, you might want to change instructions or use different form fields depending on a user’s locale. You also might need to adjust things to comply with local laws, such as the European Union’s GDPR law if you’re targeting an audience in an EU country.
• Images and other website graphics  – if you include any text or localized references in your site’s images, you’ll want to make sure you’re localizing that content by loading a different image depending on a user’s locale.
• Key landing pages – while it’s important to properly localize your entire site, you’ll want to put a special emphasis on key landing pages, as well as any other pages that play an important role in your sales funnel.
• Number formats, dates, units of measure, etc. – in addition to localizing prices, it’s also essential to make sure you’re paying attention to other nitty-gritty details that might need localization, such as dates, number formats, units of measure, and so on.

Again, this is not the only content you need to localize – you’ll want to properly localize everything on your site. But in terms of localized marketing, it’s important to add some extra focus to these key elements.

As part of localizing your content, you might find that you also need to update/tweak your site’s design to match.

If you’re using WordPress, the TranslatePress plugin lets you translate all of these elements using a visual, point-and-click interface. You can also see a live preview of your site so that you understand how your content localization affects the design of your site.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress multilingual plugin to help you implement a marketing localization strategy on your WordPress website.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

4. Implement a Localized SEO Strategy

When talking about marketing localization for a website, developing a strong localized search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is one of the most important areas to focus on.

With localized SEO, you can rank your website for queries that users in different locales are searching for in their native languages.

This helps you increase your site’s visibility in search and boost your organic traffic. With the other localized marketing strategies on this list, you can ensure that you’re then able to convert those visitors into customers.

Here are a few tips to implement a localized SEO strategy:

• Perform keyword research for multiple locales – instead of just looking at the search volume trends for keywords in your site’s original language/locale, dig into queries for other languages and regions to see if there are any differences.
• Localize your on-page SEO – in addition to your content, make sure that you’re translating and localizing important SEO details such as the SEO title, meta description, URL slug, and so on. If your site uses WordPress, the TranslatePress plugin makes it easy to localize all of these elements.
• Consider localized search engine preferences – while Google dominates much of the globe, there are certain markets where other search engines have a significant (or dominant) market share, such as South Korea (Naver), China (Baidu or Sogou), Czech Republic (Seznam), and so on.
• Make sure to include the hreflang tag – the hreflang tag helps Google understand which version of your site to serve to different types of visitors. On WordPress, the TranslatePress plugin can automatically add proper hreflang tags for you.

For a deeper look, you can read our international SEO strategy guide, as well as our post on SEO for multiple languages and our ultimate guide to multilingual SEO.

5. Optimize Your Social Media Marketing for Different Locales

Just as with SEO, you’ll also want to localize your social media marketing strategies to get the most from your efforts.

First off, you’ll likely want to create separate social media profiles for different locales, as it’s tough to mix localized content within the same account.

For example, Coca-Cola has separate Twitter profiles for Coca-Cola España (Spain), Coca-Cola France, and so on.

Some social networks have tools to automatically redirect users to a brand’s localized experience, which is also worth looking into.

Beyond creating localized profiles, you’ll also want to localize the content that you share. For example, look at how the Coca-Cola France Twitter account doesn’t just share translated posts, but shares unique content for that region (such as posts featuring local sports teams).

In some situations, you also might want to create accounts on new social networks that are popular in that locale. 

For example, Zalo is one of the most popular social networks in Vietnam. So if you wanted to create a localized social media marketing strategy for Vietnam, you would definitely want to include Zalo in your efforts (in addition to global platforms like Facebook).

6. Consider Partnering With Local Influencers

This tip might not be a part of all localized marketing strategies. But if influencer marketing is a part of your existing strategy, another great opening for localization in marketing is to partner with local influencers.

This can help you better reach that local audience and also help demonstrate to customers that you’re serious about developing a presence in that locale.

7. Set Up Analytics to Understand Your Marketing Localization Efforts

In order to understand how effective your marketing localization efforts are, it’s important to properly set up your analytics.

For example, instead of just tracking overall conversions on your site, you’ll want to be able to track conversions based on website locale. This will let you see if certain locales are underperforming (or overperforming) vs the average.

Most analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, offer built-in features to help you segment your data by a user’s location and locale. 

To simplify your workflows, however, you might want to set up custom reports to quickly see how different versions of your site are performing.

How to Perform Marketing Localization on WordPress Sites

While knowing the key fundamentals and best practices of marketing localization is important, you won’t be able to optimize your campaigns unless you’re able to actually implement those strategies on your website.

If you’ve created your website with WordPress, WordPress lacks any built-in functionality to create a multilingual and/or multiregional site with localized content. 

As such, you’ll struggle to create localized content and implement localized marketing strategies like international SEO.

To be able to implement a WordPress localized marketing strategy, you can use the TranslatePress plugin.

TranslatePress gives you an easy, code-free way to localize your entire WordPress site, including key marketing elements.

Using TranslatePress’ visual, point-and-click editor, you’ll be able to translate and localize 100% of your site’s content including the following:

• Text content anywhere on your site, whether it comes from the WordPress editor, your theme, a plugin, and so on.
• Images.
• Videos.
• Forms.
• CTA buttons.

Beyond localizing the visible marketing content on your site, TranslatePress can also help you adjust other important elements in your localized marketing strategy including the following:

• SEO titles and meta descriptions
• Social media graph information to control how your content looks when it’s shared on social media
• URL slugs

If you want the easiest way to localize your WordPress site and your marketing efforts, the TranslatePress plugin is a great place to start.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress multilingual plugin to help you implement a marketing localization strategy on your WordPress website.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Build Your Localized Marketing Strategy Today

If you want to grow your business and expand into new locales, it’s important to develop a localized marketing strategy.

With the tips on this list, you can feel confident that you’re optimizing your marketing efforts in all of the different locales that you’re targeting.

If your website uses WordPress, one of the easiest ways to implement a marketing localization strategy on your website is with the TranslatePress plugin.

TranslatePress offers an easy point-and-click way to localize all of the content on your site, including important marketing elements like CTA buttons, forms, images, SEO titles/descriptions, social media graph information, and more.

To get started, install the TranslatePress plugin today.

The post How to Perform Localized Marketing for Multilingual Sites appeared first on TranslatePress.

While image SEO is unlikely to ever be your primary focus when it comes to SEO, optimizing your images still plays a role in general on-page SEO. What’s more, nailing WordPress images SEO can also help you rank your images in Google Image Search, which is the second most popular search engine in the world.

In this post, we’re going to cover four key strategies that you need to implement for SEO friendly images. While we’re focusing on WordPress, most of these strategies are platform-agnostic and apply to any website builder or CMS.

Once we’ve covered these four strategies, we’ll also dig into WordPress image SEO for multilingual websites. If you want to offer your website in multiple languages using a plugin like TranslatePress, it’s important to create SEO friendly images for each language – and our post will also show you how to do just that.

Let’s dig in!

Four Essential Tips for WordPress Images SEO

To kick things off, let’s go over four essential tips to create SEO friendly images:

1. Add descriptive alt text and titles to all images.
2. Use contextual image filenames.
3. Optimize your images for performance.
4. Disable WordPress image attachment pages.

Add Alt Text and Titles to All Images

While most of your human visitors will only see the visual image that you embed, you also have some behind-the-scenes tools that let you add text content to each image that you use:

• Alternative text (usually called alt text) – this is behind-the-scenes text that appears to search engines and human visitors using screen reading devices. It’s supposed to be a textual representation of the image. For example, if you have an image of a horse laying in a field, the alt text would be something like “A horse laying in a field”.
• Title – this appears to a visitor when they hover their mouse over the image. You can think of this as a “tooltip” for the image. Keeping with the same example, it could be something like “This image illustrates what a laying horse looks like”. The title can provide additional thoughts beyond what’s in the image, whereas the alt text should be a literal description of what’s in the image. Or, you could use it to credit the image source.

Beyond the content itself, one of the key differences between image alt text vs title is that image titles can be seen on the page (when a user hovers their mouse) whereas alt text is only visible when looking at the site’s code (or when using an assistive device such as a screen reader).

Adding image alt text serves two purposes:

1. It provides context to Google about the content of the image, which can send relevant ranking signals.
2. It helps make your website more accessible to visitors using screen reading devices. While this might not affect SEO directly, it is an important part of creating an optimized website.

Adding the image title can offer another source for search engines to grab context, though it’s less important than alt text for SEO. It can also help visitors understand why you’re including that image.

WordPress gives you a few different ways to set image alt text and titles.

First off, you can use the settings of an Image block to set the alt text and title for that image in that specific post.

To find the title option, you’ll need to expand the Advanced settings.

You can also add alt text and titles directly from your Media Library. If you do it this way, WordPress will automatically use that same text if you ever embed the same image in a different spot. 

If you plan to reuse the image, adding the alt text and titles directly in the Media Library will save you time in the future.

Finally, if you’re using a third-party page builder, you’ll typically set image alt text via that builder’s settings. For example, if you’re using Elementor, you would add alt text via the Elementor Image widget.

Use Descriptive Filenames

Your images’ filenames are another important part of optimizing them for SEO.

Instead of using random, noncontextual filenames such as “12656223dfe3.jpg”, you should try to always use description filenames whenever possible.

Let’s keep going with the example of the horse laying in the field from above. To make the image’s filename as descriptive as possible, you might use something like “horse-laying-in-field.jpg”.

The best strategy is to set the optimal filename before you upload the image to WordPress. 

However, if you want to optimize the filenames for existing images on your site, you can use plugins like Media File Renamer or Enable Media Replace to accomplish that without causing broken images across your site.

Optimize Images for Performance

While Google says it no longer uses loading times as a direct ranking factor as of April 2023, how quickly your site loads still plays a big role in a lot of the user experience-focused ranking factors that Google uses.

And when it comes to making your website load faster, your images play a huge role. That makes optimizing your images for performance another important aspect of WordPress images SEO.

To optimize WordPress images for SEO and performance, you can use some or all of the following strategies:

1. Compress images to reduce their file sizes. You can use lossless compression (no visible change in quality) or lossy compression (there might be a visible reduction in image quality depending on how aggressive your compression is).
2. Resize images’ dimensions based on how you’re using them. For example, if your blog area is only 800 px wide, your images should be that wide as well (or maybe twice as wide if you want to account for Retina screens).
3. Lazy load below-the-fold images. This tells a visitor’s browser to wait to load images until the user starts scrolling down. WordPress now implements native browser lazy loading by default. However, some people like using a JavaScript-based lazy load plugin because it gives you more control over how it works (and not all of your users might be using browsers that support native lazy loading). 
4. Serve images from a content delivery network (CDN). This is great if your visitors come from different parts of the world. E.g. you have a multilingual website with people visiting from North America, Europe, and Asia.

For the easiest way to implement a lot of these strategies, you can consider an automated WordPress image optimization plugin like ShortPixel, Smush, Imagify, and others.

There’s also a new breed of image optimization plugins that optimizes images in real-time and serves adaptive images based on each individual user’s device using a built-in CDN. If you’re interested in this approach, you can consider plugins like Optimole or ShortPixel Adaptive Images.

Disable WordPress Attachment Pages

This last tip isn’t about optimizing the images themselves, per se. However, it is an important part of optimizing how your WordPress site treats images and avoiding hurting your SEO efforts.

By default, WordPress will create an attachment page for each image that you upload to your site. If you’re not careful, Google will be able to index these attachment pages, which can compete with your other content (and your images) and make it more difficult for Google to crawl your site.

To avoid these types of problems, most WordPress sites disable/noindex attachment pages.

Because this is such a fundamental SEO strategy for WordPress sites, pretty much any WordPress SEO plugin will include functionality to let you do this.

For example, if you’re using the popular Yoast SEO plugin, it should automatically disable media attachment pages for you. You can check this by going to Yoast SEO → Settings → Advanced → Media Pages.

SEO Friendly Images for Multilingual Sites

If you’re creating a multilingual WordPress site, you’ll want to implement the same tactics from above on the different language versions of your site.

Here are some examples:

1. You’ll want to translate the image alt text so that the images in different language versions of your site have alt text in the proper language.
2. If you’re using different image files, you’ll want the ability to “translate” the file name. If you’re using the same image in different languages, this might not be necessary, though.

Basically, the principles of multilingual SEO friendly images aren’t any different from WordPress images SEO for a single language.

The only tricky part is finding a WordPress translation plugin that lets you implement these principles.

If you don’t want to mess around with overly technical solutions, you can use the TranslatePress plugin.

TranslatePress lets you fully translate all of your site’s images and image content (e.g. alt text) from a visual, point-and-click interface.

TranslatePress is not just for images, either – it’s a full-service WordPress multilingual plugin that can help you translate every single part of your site into unlimited new languages.

To translate an image, all you need to do is hover over it and click the pencil icon on the visual preview of your page. This will open that image’s details in the sidebar.

In the sidebar, you can easily translate the alt text, title, and other image details (as long as you’ve set up those details in your site’s original language).

If you want to go even further, you also have the option to upload a different image that will be used for that language. This would let you show a different image or just “translate” the filename of the same image.

If you want to save some time, TranslatePress also lets you automatically translate all of your site’s content using your choice of Google Translate or DeepL. This automatic translation functionality includes your site’s image alt text and titles, which makes it super easy to implement WordPress images SEO for multiple languages.

Get Started With SEO for WordPress Images

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, learning how to implement WordPress images SEO is important.

While image SEO won’t shoot your site to the top of the rankings by itself, it is another essential part of nailing your site’s on-page SEO. Plus, you’ll also give yourself a chance to connect with users in the second most popular search engine in the world – Google Images.

If you’re creating a multilingual WordPress website, multilingual image SEO follows the same principles as single-language SEO. The only important thing is that you’ll need a WordPress translation plugin that makes it easy to translate your image content.

With TranslatePress, you can easily optimize your images for SEO in multiple languages. Plus, you can translate the rest of your WordPress content, as well.

If you want to get started with an SEO-optimized multilingual website, install the TranslatePress plugin today.

TranslatePress Multilingual

The best WordPress multilingual plugin to create SEO friendly images in all languages.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post WordPress Images SEO: 4 Tips to Create SEO Friendly Images appeared first on TranslatePress.

Elementor is the most popular WordPress page builder plugin and it lets you build amazing, dynamic websites. But if you want to offer those websites in multiple languages, you’ll need the help of a third-party plugin.

TranslatePress is a free WordPress multilingual plugin that offers deep support for Elementor, including letting you add a flexible Elementor language switcher to various parts of your designs.

In this post, we’ll show you how you can use the free TranslatePress plugin to add a language switcher to Elementor, including also translating your Elementor content manually or via tools like Google Translate.

Here’s an example of adding a language switcher to a Theme Builder template, but you’ll also get other options for placing your language switcher:

In addition to letting you add the language switcher, TranslatePress also includes some other Elementor integrations, such as letting you show or hide certain Elementor widgets and sections based on the language that a visitor chose.

Before we start off, here’s a quick video tutorial explaining how to do this in short:

But if you want to get into more detail and take things at your own pace, please continue reading this article.

Ready to go? Here’s how to set it up…

How to Add an Elementor Language Switcher for Free

To create your language switcher, you need the free TranslatePress plugin.

TranslatePress is a complete WordPress multilingual plugin, which means it helps you both translate your content and add a front-end language switcher that your visitors can use.

TranslatePress lets you use both automatic and manual translation (or a mix of both) and you’ll be able to manage all of your translations via a visual point-and-click editor – just like how Elementor lets you use a visual editor to create your designs:

As an added bonus, TranslatePress also includes some special integrations for Elementor, such as letting you show or hide certain widgets and sections based on the language a user has chosen.

You’ll be able to use the free version of TranslatePress to add your language switcher and translate your Elementor site’s content into one new language. To add support for unlimited languages and access some other advanced features, you can also upgrade to the paid version of TranslatePress. We’ll be sure to note any features that require the paid version.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Here’s the basic process:

1. Install TranslatePress and choose your languages;
2. Customize your Elementor language switcher;
3. Translate your content.

Let’s look at each step in detail…

1. Install TranslatePress and Choose Languages

To get started, install and activate the free TranslatePress plugin from WordPress.org.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, go to Settings → TranslatePress to choose the languages that you want to offer on your site:

• Default Language – the language that your Elementor site’s content currently exists in.
• All Languages – one or more new languages into which you want to translate your Elementor site’s content. The free version supports one new language while the premium version of TranslatePress allows unlimited languages.

These are also the languages that will appear as options in your language switcher.

For the TraslatePress installation and setup process, you can also watch this video tutorial:

2. Customize Your Elementor Language Switcher

By default, TranslatePress adds a floating language switcher to the bottom-right corner of your site that includes all of the languages that you selected in the previous step. This language switcher will appear on every page*, whether or not you’ve built the page with Elementor.

* Note – if you exclude certain content from translation, the language switcher will not appear on pages where you’ve disabled translation.

If you want to adjust the location, TranslatePress also lets you place your language switcher using a shortcode or menu item, including changing behavior (such as only showing the language name and hiding the flag).

You can manage all of these settings from the Language Switcher section in the TranslatePress settings area (Settings → TranslatePress). You can disable a specific location by unchecking the box and use the drop-downs to control behavior.

For example, to disable the floating language switcher so that you can manually place a language switcher in another location of your Elementor designs, you just need to uncheck that box:

Now, let’s look at how you can use these options to place your language switcher in Elementor designs.

Using the Language Switcher Shortcode in Elementor

The most flexible option to place a language switcher in your Elementor designs is to use the shortcode – [language-switcher].

You can add this shortcode anywhere in your Elementor designs using Elementor’s Shortcode widget:

In the Advanced tab of the widget’s settings, you can use all of the normal Elementor settings to control spacing, positioning, etc.

If you’re using Elementor Pro and its Theme Builder, you can also include the language switcher shortcode in the templates that you create with Theme Builder. For example, you could create a template for your individual blog posts and include the language switcher below the post title.

Here’s a simple example that uses the shortcode block to place a language switcher underneath the post title and info:

Using the Language Switcher Menu Item in Elementor

If you’re using Elementor Theme Builder to design your own custom header, you can also place your language switcher in that header template by using the dedicated language switcher menu item that TranslatePress provides.

First, open the header template that you created with Elementor Theme Builder to check the name of the menu that you’re using in the Nav Menu widget. In this example, the menu name is “Primary Menu”:

Then, go to Appearance → Menus in your WordPress dashboard to edit that menu. Make sure you’re editing the right menu by using the drop-down at the top. Then, you can add your language switcher to the menu using the dedicated Language Switcher menu items.

You can either add each language as a top-level menu item. Or, you can set the Current Language as the top-level item and add the other languages as sub-menus (pictured below):

Once you save your changes, you’ll see your language switcher appear in the menu of your Elementor header template:

If your Elementor website only has 2 languages, you can also opt for a clickable language button where your switcher always displays the alternate language option. For this, all you have to do is add the Opposite Language item from the list. There is no need to add the languages when going for this option.

Now, when you save your changes, if your site is displayed in English, your switcher will only display Spanish (or the language you chose to translate it into). Once the visitor switches to Spanish, the button will now display English.

You can also use this same exact approach to add your language switcher to a footer template that you create with Elementor Pro (or really anywhere where you use Elementor’s Nav Menu widget).

3. Translate Your Content

Once you’ve added your Elementor language switcher (or language switchers – you can add multiple language switchers in different positions if needed), your next step is to actually translate your site’s content so that visitors can see your translated content when they choose a non-default language via the language switcher.

TranslatePress supports two methods for translation:

• Automatic machine translation – you can automatically generate your site’s translations using Google Translate (available in the free version of TranslatePress) or DeepL (requires the Business license).
• Manual translation – you can manually add or edit your site’s translations using the visual editor.

You can also mix and match the two approaches – so you could use automatic translation to generate your site’s baseline translations but then go back and manually adjust those machine translations as needed.

We’ll show you quickly how translation works in this section. However, if you want a detailed look, we’ve also written full guides on translating Elementor:

• How to translate Elementor sites in general
• How to translate Elementor popup content for multilingual sites

Set Up Automatic Translation (Optional)

This step is 100% optional – you can also just move to the next step to manually translate your content.

If you want to enable automatic translation via Google Translate or DeepL, go to Settings → TranslatePress → Automatic Translation.

Set the drop-down to Yes and then configure your preferred automatic translation service. We have a detailed guide on how to automatically translate WordPress and WooCommerce, along with dedicated setup guides for both services:

• Google Translate
• DeepL

Use the Visual Translation Editor

To manually add or edit your translations, you can use the visual translation editor in TranslatePress, which we previewed a little earlier in this post.

To open the editor, go to the piece of content that you want to translate on the front-end of your site and click the Translate Page option on the WordPress toolbar:

You should see a live preview of your site along with a sidebar on the left where you can manage your translations. To edit the translation for any piece of content, you can hover over that piece of content on the live preview of your site and click the pencil icon.

This will open the content’s translation in the sidebar, where you can add the translation (or edit the existing translation, if you used automatic translation):

You can repeat the process to translate all of your content, whether it comes from Elementor, the native WordPress block editor, or another plugin. You can also “translate” images to display a different image depending on the language a user chose.

The process is always the same – point and click. But if you want to see in-context examples for specific types of content, we have lots of guides to help you out:

• Images
• Editor (Gutenberg) blocks
• Custom fields
• Custom post types
• WordPress forms
• WordPress menus
• Popup content
• Sliders
• WooCommerce products

Translate Behind-the-Scenes Metadata (Like SEO Titles)

With the premium version of TranslatePress and its SEO Pack add-on, you can also use this same approach to translate behind-the-scenes information like Yoast SEO titles and meta descriptions, for example, social media graph information, and more.

Once you upgrade and install the SEO Pack add-on, you can access these translations by using the drop-down in the translation editor sidebar:

You’ll also get a new String List section that lets you translate all of the various URL slugs on your site.

Bonus: Show/Hide Elementor Widgets and Sections Based on Language

In addition to helping you create a language switcher, TranslatePress also includes a special Elementor integration that lets you show/hide certain Elementor widgets or sections based on the language that a user selected.

For example, you could create a special widget that only displays for people browsing in English. Or, you could create a special widget that displays for everyone except for people browsing in English.

You’ll be able to access this feature from inside the Elementor interface. When you edit any widget or section, you’ll get two new options in the Advanced tab:

• Restrict by Language – only show this widget or section to people browsing in a certain language.
• Exclude by Language – show this widget or section to all visitors except for people browsing in a certain language.

Create Your Elementor Language Switcher Today

With TranslatePress, you can easily add an Elementor language switcher and translate your Elementor site’s content into one or more new languages.

TranslatePress offers out-of-the-box support for translating Elementor content, even letting you translate designs that you create with Elementor Popup Builder or Theme Builder.

Beyond that, you’ll also get special Elementor integrations, such as showing or hiding widgets or sections based on the language a user chose in the language switcher.

You can get started with the free version from WordPress.org to translate your site into one new language and access all of the language switcher settings.

Then, upgrade to the premium version to be able to add unlimited languages, translate SEO and social media metadata, and access other useful features like:

• DeepL support for automatic translation.
• Automatically redirecting users to their preferred languages.
• Translator accounts.
• Showing separate menus based on a user’s language (rather than just translating the same set of menu items).

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Do you still have any questions about working with your Elementor site’s language switcher? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post How to Add an Elementor Language Switcher for Your Multilingual Site appeared first on TranslatePress.