Are you looking for the best WordPress translation plugin ?
WordPress is used by millions of non-English websites around the world. You can use WordPress to create a website in any language you want.
However, WordPress does not have the built-in ability to create multilingual websites. Fortunately, some powerful WordPress translation plugins allow you to easily add multilingual content to your site.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress translation plugins that you can use to create multilingual websites.
We will consider their features, pros and cons to help you choose the best option for your website.
Choosing a translation plugin to create multilingual WordPress sites
Most beginners do not know that you can install WordPress in your own language and use it to create websites in any language.
With the help of extensions, you can create bilingual or multilingual websites. You can even allow users to translate content using Google Translate.
While many translation extensions are available for WordPress, they can be classified into two main categories.
- Multilingual WordPress plugins
- Automated WordPress translation plugins
Multilingual plugins allow you to manually add multilingual content to your website. The main benefit of these plugins is that the quality of your translations will be much better than any machine-generated online translation tools.
The second type of WordPress translation add-ons uses online translation services to translate your content. These plugins do not require you to write content in multiple languages, but the quality of the translations is not as good as it should be.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the best WordPress multilingual plugins and machine translation components.
The best multilingual WordPress plugins
Unlike extensions for automated WordPress translation, these multilingual extensions allow you to manually translate every aspect of your website, including content, theme, extensions, and more.
Here are our top picks of the best multilingual WordPress plugins to easily translate the entire website.
1. TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a multilingual WordPress plugin for translating every aspect of your website. The main advantage of TranslatePress is that it allows you to translate directly from the front end.
You can easily switch languages during translation, and the live preview will change instantly. Another benefit of this approach is that you can translate content, template, plugins and even metadata without changing the interface.
TranslatePress is ideal for manual translations. You can translate yourself or assign a custom translator user role to any user on your site. Such users can translate content without access to the administration area.
If manual translations require a lot of work, you can use translation from Google for machine translations. This approach allows you to use AI-supported translations with manual corrections.
The plugin generates SEO-friendly addresses for all languages, giving you a boost in local SEO results.
Pricing : starts from 89 euros for a personal license.
2. WPML
WPML is one of the most popular multilingual WordPress plugins. It comes with a powerful translation management system that allows you to translate content, themes, plugins, and more.
WPML comes in the multilingual blog and multilingual CMS licensing plans. You will need a multilingual e-commerce CMS plan, page builder support, custom fields, translation team management, and other features.
It has an easy-to-use interface for adding translations and managing multilingual content across your website. WPML supports all kinds of posts, labels, custom fields and strings created by your WordPress templates and extensions.
It also allows you to link your website to third-party translation service providers. You can select the content you want to translate and send it directly to your website.
Pricing: 39 dollars for the multilingual blog version and 99 dollars for the multilingual content management system.
3. Polylang
Polylang is another powerful add-on to easily create a multilingual or bilingual WordPress site. It comes with a simple interface to easily add subtitles to your posts, pages, custom post types, tools, and more.
Polylang does not come with support for translating your WordPress template and plugins. The default extension does not include e-commerce support, so you will need to purchase a paid extension.
It allows you to set up SEO-friendly عناوين headings for each language and works well with popular WordPress SEO add-ons . To choose the language, you can add the language converter to your website using the sidebar tool.
Pricing: the basic add-on is free. You can get the Professional version for 99 Euros with a single site license.
4. Weglot
Weglot is a cloud-based website translation platform. It works with WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce and more.
You will need to enter the Weglot API to connect your WordPress site to their platform during setup. After that, you will choose your preferred language, the language of the site and the languages you want to add.
You will have to use the Weglot website to translate all your content, manage translations and push them to your Live website.
Other notable features include SEO-friendly URL support, WooCommerce support, a language switch button, third-party translation services, and more.
Weglot uses a monthly pricing structure based on the number of languages and words translated. This may make it more expensive for you than some additional multilingual WordPress plugins with a fixed annual license.
Pricing: starts from 9.90 euros per month for one language and 10,000 words. Their popular PRO Plan supports five languages and 200,000 words for 49 euros per month.
5. MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress takes a slightly different approach to creating multilingual websites using WordPress. Instead of running on a normal WordPress installation, it uses the built-in WordPress multisite network for each language.
This extension allows efficient content management for each language while improving performance by loading one language at a time. It comes with an easy interface to manage your translations from a single control panel.
Supports posts, pages, custom post types, labels and more. Due to their structure, each language can be in its own subdomain, directory, or even a custom domain name .
Pricing: starting from 99 USD per year for a single multi-site license.
The best WordPress translation plugins
These extensions allow you to translate your website using machine translation services or provide translations manually for some parts of your website.
6. GTranslate
Translate WordPress with GTranslate is a plugin for Google Translate for WordPress. It automatically connects to the Google Translate API and can fetch translations for any supported languages.
It allows you to add a language converter to easily translate your web pages, or you can automatically translate content based on the language of the user’s browser.
The extension also offers a paid version, which allows you to choose SEO-friendly عناوين titles and allow search engines to index your translated content.
7. Multilanguage Translation
Multilanguage Translation is a free WordPress translation plugin and language converter. It allows you to manually translate pages, publications, tools, navigation menus and more.
The plugin comes with dozens of pre-installed languages, and you can also add new ones as you like. Moreover, you can display the modern language switching option on your website using the flag icons. It also supports RTL languages .
8. Google website translator
The Google website translator plugin allows you to use the Google Translate API to translate the content of your website. It uses the default Translation button from Google, which you can view anywhere on your website.
You can select the languages you want to show in the language converter, which can be displayed using the sidebar tool or a built-in shortcode.
The shortcode feature allows you to provide automated translations of specific pages as needed. The translated page will be visible to users when they choose the language, or the plugin detects it via the browser settings.
9. Loco Translate
Loco Translate is slightly different from other translation extensions in the list. It allows you to translate 0WordPress templates and plugins.
If your WordPress template or extension is ready for translation, you can use Loco Translate to translate it inside the WordPress dashboard. It uses a simple user interface similar to common translation tools, with one column for the original strings and the other for translation.
Our selection of the best multilingual WordPress software
If you are looking for a multilingual WordPress component to manually translate content on your website, we recommend using TranslatePress .
It is very user-friendly for beginners and easy to use, even for users who have no experience in operating multilingual websites. It is optimized for SEO and performance, two features that will benefit your business in the long run.
To get automatic WordPress translations, we recommend using the Gtranslate WordPress gtranslate plugin. It’s easy to use, and even the free version is very good for automatic translations.
Should I allow search engines to index machine translations ?
Some translation plugins allow you to make automatic translations available for indexing by search engines.
Such machine translations are not very good. They can be strange and even misleading at times. Allowing search engines to index such low-quality content is a bad idea. Google can identify this content and will consider it Spam that will harm the search rankings of your website.
However, for manual translations of sites, you should let Google index the translated versions, so you can get a higher ranking in local SEO.
We hope that this article helped you find the best WordPress translation extensions for your multilingual site.