Looking for ways to translate your content and reach an international audience? Look no further. In this post, we’ll show you the best translation plugins for WordPress and all the benefits these tools can offer to your business.
If you have international visitors or want to reach a wider audience, translating your site is a smart play. The problem is that translating any blog or online store manually takes a lot of time and money. Additionally, you have to constantly translate the new content, so what seemed like a good idea at the beginning could quickly become a nightmare. The good news, however, is that there’s a solution for that: translation plugins.
What Are Translation Plugins?
Translation plugins are tools that you can use to create a multi-language website. Usually, when you install WordPress on your web hosting service, you will be able to choose a single language. It can be English, Spanish, Portuguese, or any language of your choice. The problem is that sometimes you may want to have your site in different languages, especially if you have visitors from different parts of the world.
That’s where WordPress translation plugins can be very helpful. These tools allow you to translate your content into multiple languages and also convert your site into a multilingual store.
There are two types of translation plugins:
- Those that create manual translations
- Those that use translations done by machines
Let’s have a quick look at both.
Manual Translation Plugins
With this type of plugin, you will have to take care of the translation. The plugin provides you with every feature you may need such as integration options, compatibility features, and so on, but you will need to translate the content manually to your preferred language. As you can imagine, this involves a lot of work, especially if you have a lot of content on your site.
On top of that, if you aren’t familiar with the language you want to translate your site to, you’ll need to hire a professional translator which will also increase the costs.
Machine Translation Plugins
In this case, machines generate translations, so you can add languages much faster. The most common examples of this type of service are Google translator and DeepL.
With this type of plugin, you simply configure it and the tool takes care of the rest. Once you select the languages you want to offer, when the website visitor selects a language from the language switcher, the plugin will display the website in the requested language using automatic translations.
This is an excellent option when you have a lot of content to translate and want to get the job done fast. Even though these translations usually aren’t as accurate as the manual ones, they’ve improved a lot over the years.
Now you know what they are and the different types, let’s focus on the benefits of translation plugins.
Benefits of Translation Plugins
The main benefit of the translation plugins is that they allow you to translate content very quickly and with minimal effort. This way, you can reach much wider audiences, offer content in users’ native language, and grow your business much faster.
Additionally, many of these tools don’t need human translations. Hiring experienced translators can be expensive, so if you are on a tight budget, translator plugins can be extremely helpful. You may need to hire someone to proofread the content but it won’t be a translation from scratch.
Another benefit of translation plugins is that they are SEO-friendly. When you create different versions of a page or post, each one will rank individually on search engines. By properly using the hreflang attribute in the HTML version of the web page, Google bots and other search engine crawlers can easily understand the content and help you rank higher on search engine results.
Most WordPress translator plugins come with easy-to-use configuration options, so even a beginner can use these tools to translate content. In addition, all the popular plugins allow users to translate the entire website including widgets, backend, menus, and everything users can interact with.
Another important benefit of translating content is that it will help you increase page views, reduce bounce rate, and boost conversion rates. For example, if you run a campaign for Spanish markets, having a landing page and product pages in their native language will increase the chances of converting that lead into a customer.
Best Translation Plugins for WordPress
There are many tools out there and it can be hard to choose the right one for you, so in this post, we will list our selection of the best translation plugins for WordPress:
- Weglot (Free and Premium)
- Polylang (Free and Premium)
- WPML (Premium)
- TranslatePress (Free and Premium)
- MultilingualPress (Premium)
- Google Website Translator (Free)
Without further ado, let’s go to the list.
1) Weglot
Weglot is one of the best translation plugins for WordPress. This power-packed solution comes with many unique features to turn your site into a multilingual website.
One of the main functionalities of Weglot is visitor language detection and redirection. The plugin can automatically detect the language that the visitors use on their browser and redirect them to your website’s specific language version (if you have it). This way, you can reduce the bounce rate and provide visitors with a personalized experience.
Additionally, it includes an export and import feature that’s helpful if you have multiple websites that need the same configuration. Weglot also includes services to hire the best professional translators. If you want an experienced translator to take care of your business’ translations, you can hire them from the Weglot platform for €0.13 per word.
You can also use a custom domain for your translations. For example, if you need to display a Spanish version of your website, you can use a domain name like yourdomain.es. You can also create your languages using the tool which is useful when you need to use a language that isn’t listed in the Weglot platform.
Finally, if you have a team to work with, you can invite them to your project to work together.
Features
- Visitor language redirection
- Access to professional translators
- Export and import of the configuration
- Invite team members
- Dedicated account manager with enterprise plan
Pricing
Weglot is a freemium tool. With the free version, you can translate your website (up to 2000 words) into one language, whereas the premium plans start at €99 per year.
2) Polylang
If you’re looking for an efficient translation tool that’s easy to use, check out Polylang. It is a beginner-friendly translation plugin with good features that has more than 600,000 users. It allows you to translate your WordPress posts, pages, media, category, tags, and custom post types. The main difference with Weglot is that you need to do the translations yourself.
You can translate your pages, posts, widgets, categories, post tags, and menus. One of Plyglot’s main features is the translated page assigning. Whenever you add a new language and translate the contents, you can choose the destination directory. You can select subdomains, subdirectories, or any other domains. Additionally, you can easily enable or disable languages from the plugin’s settings.
This tool has lightweight code, so it doesn’t affect speed and performance. Additionally, it integrates with ACF Pro (Advanced Custom Fields Pro) and all major SEO plugins, and it’s optimized for MySQL databases.
Finally, Polyglot automatically adds the hreflang tag in the HTML version of your web pages, helping Google bots better understand your web page and rank it higher.
Features
- Manual translations
- Translate page, posts, widget, menus, tags, categories, and custom post types
- Rest API support
- Integration with ACF Pro and major SEO plugins
- Permalink translations
- Use custom directory for translated versions
Pricing
Polylang is a freemium plugin. The free version includes basic features and is available from the WordPress repository. On the other hand, the premium version comes with more advanced functionalities and will set you back €99 per year. This tool also has multiple premium add-ons such as WooCommerce add-on, business packs, and more.
3) WPML
WPML is one of the best and most popular WordPress translation plugins available in the market. One of its main advantages is its seamless integration with third-party tools such as Contact Form 7, Divi Builder, Yoast, WooCommerce, Slider Revolution, Gravity Forms, Elementor, themes like Avada, and many others. Regardless of the plugins and theme you have on your website, WPML will work smoothly.
WPML comes in 40 languages, making it easy to translate your site into different languages from the configuration page. Additionally, there is no limit to the number of languages you can use on your site, making it a great option for admins that want to grow fast. On top of that, you can also add custom languages to the website using WPML’s language editor. And when it comes to translation, you will have complete control as you can easily translate your posts, pages, custom post types, menus, widgets, and WordPress admin dashboard texts.
WPML also integrates with WooCommerce allowing you to change your WooCommerce store language, currency and provide your visitors with a more localized site. There’s also a WPML advanced translation editor that you can share with your team and share the translation work.
Finally, you can either translate the content yourself or let the plugin take care of it automatically. And even if you choose an automated translation, you will be able to edit it.
Features
- Compatible issues with many plugins and themes
- 40+ languages available
- Automated and manual translation
- Advanced translation editor
- eCommerce optimized
Pricing
WPML is a premium tool that starts at 39 USD per year. You can learn more about this plugin here.
4) TranslatePress
TranslatePress is another of the best translation plugins for WordPress that allows you to translate your entire site right from the front end. It includes Google’s automatic translation and DeepL (a neural machine translation service) providing a better translation experience. On top of that, it is compatible with WooCommerce, complex themes, page builders, and custom post types, and also supports Yoast, Rank Math, All In One SEO Pack, SEOPress, and other SEO plugins.
TranslatePress also comes with a feature to help you view your website as a visitor. You can create translator accounts with full rights to translate the website from the front end, and the part is that the translator accounts don’t need to access the back end of the website, site builders, or meta boxes.
With TranslatePress, you can add as many languages as you want and publish the languages. The plugin also supports dynamic strings translation, which means that you can translate the dynamic strings added by WordPress, active theme, or your plugins. Finally, you can easily customize the language switcher widget to match your website’s style.
Features
- Gutenberg optimized
- Compatible with most themes, page builders, and plugins
- Image translation
- Automatic translation
- SEO ready
Pricing
TranslatePress is a freemium plugin that has a free version available on the WordPress repository and different premium plans that start at €79 per year for 1 site.
5) MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress is a feature-rich and popular translation tool that allows you to create your website in different languages. One of the things that make this one of the best translation plugins for WordPress is its compatibility page builders, Gutenberg, WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, and many other tools. On top of that, the Yoast SEO Sync feature synchronizes the post metadata of Yoast SEO between the translated posts to give your site an SEO boost.
This plugin includes more than 800 languages by default and based on your website visitors’ browser settings, automatically redirects them to their preferred language. To help you more with SEO, MultilingualPress adds hreflang attributes to your translated pages. Additionally, you can duplicate your entire site replicating the posts, pages, content, widgets, and even the configuration options.
You can also create a language switcher by dragging and dropping the languages you want to include, and add custom widgets to the primary navigation menu or wherever you like. Finally, MultilingualPress is 100% developer-friendly, allowing you to add more features by following the developer documentation.
Features
- 800+ languages by default
- WooCommerce and Gutenberg optimized
- Compatible with page builders, Advanced Custom Fields Pro, Yoast SEO and other plugins
- Custom language switcher
- Duplicate sites in a few clicks
Pricing
MultilingualPress is a premium plugin that starts at 99 USD per year for a single domain license.
6) Google Website Translator
Google Website Translator is an excellent option for those that want to use Google’s automatic translations on their websites. With this tool, you can easily translate your site into 100+ languages without any manual customization. It comes with three inline and four tabbed display styles to choose from, so you choose the one that best adjusts to your site style.
You can use this tool both as a widget or as a shortcode, so your visitors can switch languages according to their preferences. We highly recommend adding it to your primary menu or somewhere that gets a lot of attention, so users see it straight away. To make the language switcher look better, you can also display flags next to each language. This is a simple but elegant feature.
Google Website Translator is lightweight so won’t cause any problems in terms of page loading time, speed, and performance. All the plugin’s settings are stored in a single MySQL database record avoiding overloading your database. On top of that, this tool doesn’t load any external files like CSS or JS, resulting in reduced HTTP requests and page size.
Finally, this plugin includes an import/export feature that can help business owners export all the plugin’s settings, which can be useful if you have several websites.
Features
- Easy configuration
- Multiple display styles
- 100+ languages available
- Great performance
- Import/export settings
Pricing
Google Website Translator is a free plugin that you can download from the WordPress repository.
Conclusion
In summary, translating your website is a good way to attract more visitors and reach a wider audience. Additionally, they can help you provide users with a better experience by displaying content in their native language.
In this article, we’ve seen that you can use plugins that allow you to create manual translations and others that use automated translations. Considering the large number of tools out there, it can be hard to choose the right one for you. So in this guide, we’ve had a look at some of the best translation plugins for WordPress.
All the tools we’ve mentioned in this post are excellent choices and come with some unique features. Which one should you choose? It depends. If you have an online store and use WooCommerce, there are several tools that are a good fit. Weglot, Polylang, WPML, TranslatePress, and MultilingualPress are all optimized for WooCommerce and page builders. You can start with the free versions of Weglot and TranslatePress and then upgrade if you want more advanced functionalities. Alternatively, if you want a completely free tool with automatic translations, Google Website Translator is a good option. It doesn’t offer as many features or integration opportunities as other tools, but it’s a good start.
On the other hand, if working on the backend is not your thing and you prefer to do all the translating from the front-end, TranslatePress is your best choice.
Finally, keep in mind that most of these plugins use automatic translations. We recommend you check out a few, check out the quality of the translations, and then choose the one that you like best.
Which plugin are you going to use? Have you tried any other? Let us know in the comments below.
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