Have you ever wanted to change languages on your website using a frontend language switcher? There are a number of premium plugins you can use to do this. But, in this tutorial I’m going to show you how to implement it using a plugin that’s now free and part of the core WordPress software – the WPML Language Switcher.
Have you ever had the need for the WordPress users to select which language they want their site to be shown in? Have there ever been a situation when you wanted to display the content in another language? Do you sometimes think that it would be great if you could do that without having to login and change the language settings? Great, what if I also tell you that it is not only easy but it doesn’t require any lines of code? Let me show you.
The WordPress language switcher is a plugin that allows you to change your whole site’s language with just one click. It works on the frontend and backend of your website, giving you a quicker way to change all elements of your website. You can test your whole site’s presence before going live with the new language.
WordPress Language Plugin For Frontend
Are you looking for the best WordPress translation plugins?
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 capability to create multilingual websites. Luckily, some powerful WordPress translation plugins let you easily add multilingual content to your site.
In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress translation plugins you can use to create multilingual websites.
We will look at their features, pros, and cons to help you pick the best option for your website.
Choosing a Translation Plugin to Create Multilingual WordPress Websites
Most beginners don’t know that you can install WordPress in your own language and use it to make websites in any language.
With the help of plugins, you can create bilingual or multilingual websites. You can even allow your users to translate content using Google Translate.
While many translation plugins are available for WordPress, they can be characterized into two main categories.
- WordPress multilingual plugins
- Automated WordPress translation plugins
The multilingual plugins allow you to manually add multilingual content to your website. The main benefit of these plugins is the quality of your translations will be significantly better than any machine-generated online translation tools.
The second type of WordPress translation plugins uses online translation services to translate your content. These plugins don’t require you to write content in multiple languages, but the quality of translations is not as good as it can be.
That being said, let’s look at the best WordPress multilingual plugins and automated translation plugins.
Best WordPress Multilingual Plugins
Unlike automated WordPress translation plugins, these multilingual plugins allow you to manually translate every aspect of your website, including content, theme, plugins, and more.
Following are our top picks for the best WordPress multilingual plugins to easily translate your entire website.
1. TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a full-fledged WordPress multilingual plugin to translate every aspect of your website. The main feature of TranslatePress is that it allows you to translate directly from the frontend.
You can easily switch languages during the translation, and the live preview will change instantly. Another benefit of this approach is that you can translate content, theme, plugins, and even meta-data without changing the interface.
TranslatePress is perfect for manual translations. You can translate yourself or assign the custom translator user role to any user on your site. These users can translate content without access to the admin area.
If manual translations sound like a lot of work, you can use Google Translate for machine translations. This approach allows you to use AI-powered translations with manual corrections.
The plugin creates SEO-friendly URLs for all languages, which gives you a boost in local SEO results.
To learn more, see our guide on how to easily translate WordPress with TranslatePress.
Pricing: Starting from €89 for a personal license.
2. WPML
WPML is one of the most popular WordPress multilingual plugins. It comes with a powerful translation management system that allows you to translate content, themes, plugins, and more.
WPML comes in Multilingual blog and Multilingual CMS licensing plans. You’ll need the multilingual CMS plan for eCommerce, page builder support, custom fields, managing translation teams, and other features.
It has an easy-to-use interface to add translations and manage multilingual content across your website. WPML supports all post types, taxonomies, custom fields, and strings generated by your WordPress themes and plugins.
It also allows you to connect your website to third-party translation service providers. You can select which content needs to be translated and get it submitted directly to your website.
For detailed instructions, see our step-by-step guide on how to create a multilingual WordPress site with WPML.
Pricing: $39 for the Multilingual Blog version and $99 for the Multilingual CMS.
3. Polylang
Polylang is another powerful plugin to easily create a multilingual or bilingual WordPress site. It comes with a simple interface to easily add translations for your posts, pages, custom post types, widgets, and more.
Polylang does not come with support to translate your WordPress theme and plugins. The default plugin doesn’t include eCommerce support, so you will need to purchase a paid addon.
It allows you to set up SEO-friendly URLs for each language and works well with popular WordPress SEO plugins. For language selection, you can add the language switcher to your website using a sidebar widget.
For more details, see our tutorial on how to create a multilingual WordPress site with Polylang.
Pricing: The base plugin is free. You can get the Pro version for €99 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 Weglot API to connect your WordPress site to their platform during the setup. After that, you will choose your preferred language, site language, and the languages you want to add.
You will have to use Weglot’s 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 switcher button, third-party translation services, and more.
Weglot uses a monthly pricing structure based on the number of languages and translated words. This may make it more expensive for you than some other multilingual WordPress plugins with a fixed yearly license.
Pricing: Starting from €9.90 / month for one language and 10,000 Words. Their popular PRO plan supports five languages and 200,000 words for €49 per month.
5. MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress takes a slightly different approach to create multilingual websites with WordPress. Instead of running on a normal WordPress install, it uses the built-in WordPress multisite network for each language.
This allows the plugin to efficiently manage content 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 dashboard.
It supports posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies, and more. Due to its architecture, each language can be on its own subdomain, directory, or even a custom domain name.
Pricing: Starting from $99 / year for a single multisite license.
Best WordPress Translation Plugins
These plugins allow you to translate your website using automated translation services or manually providing translations for some parts of your website.