Want to make a multilingual WordPress site that’s user-friendly and accessible for an international audience? Then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ve picked six of the most popular WordPress localisation plugins for you to choose from.
These plugins offer a range of features from automatic translation and multilingual SEO, to Translation Management Systems and e-commerce functionality, there’s something for everyone here!
1. TranslatePress
First on our list is TranslatePress. If you are big on ease of use, then this plugin is a fantastic choice. It’s user-friendly and lets you translate your website directly from the front end using a live preview that shows translations in real time.
TranslatePress supports manual and automatic translations (via Google Translate or DeepL). It also lets you translate all website elements, including shortcodes, forms, and page builder outputs. On top of that, TranslatePress is SEO-friendly and compatible with WooCommerce, making it an excellent option for e-commerce websites.
Price: Some advanced features are only available in the premium version, but you can get most of the job done with the free version. You can purchase a single site’s premium version for around £76/year.
2. GTranslate
The GTranslate plugin automatically changes your WordPress site’s language using Google Translate’s API. It allows you to translate an unlimited number of words and pages into up to 100 languages. So if your website is rolling out a lot of content, this could be the plugin for you.
This plugin also supports multilingual SEO, allowing you to create separate domains for each language as well as translating URLs for you.
Price: Most of GTranslate’s features are free, but if you want advanced functionalities like editing automatic translations, hosting in different languages, or using the search engine indexing feature, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.
It’s also worth noting that the free version uses statistical machine translations (which are less accurate), whereas the paid version uses Google’s neural translations.
Payment plans start at just under £8 ($9.99) a month.
3. WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin)
WPML is possibly the most popular WordPress localisation plugin. It allows you to translate your website content into 65 pre-configured languages and manage translations directly from your WordPress dashboard. With WPML, you can translate posts, pages, custom types, taxonomy, menus, and even the theme’s texts.
WPML also features a Translation Management System in their Translation Dashboard that lets you easily manage workflows. Additionally, it integrates with most popular SEO plugins and lets you optimise your SEO for each language individually.
Price: WPML doesn’t have a free tier and pricing starts at $39 per year. (That’s just over £30 for our fellow Brits.)
4. Polylang
Another excellent WordPress localisation plugin is Polylang. This plugin offers awesome functionalities, letting you translate several content types, including media, menus, custom post types, and widgets.
Polylang does not provide automatic translation but does integrate with the Lingotek translation plugin.
Polylang works well with most popular SEO plugins and automatically handles multilingual SEO features like hreflang tags. Additionally, Polylang is compatible with RTL languages and can be used with most WordPress themes.
Polylang easily integrates with the admin dashboard. And since it operates on WordPress’ built-in core features, it doesn’t cause any performance issues.
Polylang also offers a Woocommerce add-on for managing multilingual e-commerce, as well as a “Business Pack” which includes extra functions like support for ACF and REST API support.
Price: Although it offers a free version, the features are quite limited. To get the more advanced features, you’ll need to buy the Pro version for £85. The Woocommerce add-on is purchased separately for an additional £85 and the Business Pack will cost you £120.
5. Weglot
Weglot is easy to set up and integrates seamlessly with your website, allowing you to start translating your content in minutes.
This plugin provides you with automatic translations using neural machine translation. You can then manually edit this translation yourself to refine for a certain tone of voice.
Weglot will automatically translate any new pages added to the site and provides you with a Glossary tool so that you can keep track of commonly used terms and their translations.
Additionally, when people visit your site, it will detect their language from their browser settings and redirect them to the correct version of your site.
One of the standout features of Weglot is its in-context editor, which lets you see your translations within the actual design of your site, making it easier to ensure that the translated text fits well within your layout.
Price: Weglot operates on a subscription model based on the number of translated words and languages, which can get expensive for larger websites. The most affordable plan costs around £12/month for one translated language and up to 10,000 words.
6. Multilingual Press
Multilingual Press is a WordPress plugin that works with the WordPress MultiSite feature. Since it uses multisites, the plugin only loads one language per site. This is intended to reduce performance issues that you might encounter with other plugins that load all of the languages on a site but only display one.
Multilingual Press allows you to create different versions of your site for different regions and lets you customise more than just the language of each site. You can have completely different designs or plugins for each version of your site, giving you greater control over your website localisation.
Multilingual Press also provides automatic translations which you can edit yourself, as well as letting you create your own language switcher. Finally, the plugin is compatible with advanced custom fields (ACF), Yoast SEO, and WooCommerce.
Price:
MultilingualPress doesn’t have a free version, and pricing starts at around £78 per year. The cheapest tier provides you with 3 languages and 1 multisite.
Conclusion
The range of localisation plugins available today provides a wealth of options for making your site more versatile and accessible around the world.
With the plugins in this article, you’ll have the tools you need to translate your content, optimise multilingual SEO, and manage your localisation workflows.
