A multilingual WordPress website is a necessity when your visitors can come from all parts of the world, allowing them to visit your website in their preferred language.
However, WordPress doesn’t offer the built-in features that allow you to do this. Fortunately, this can be done by using a translation plugin. We’re going to look at a few of the best translation plugins that can give you a multilingual website.
1. ConveyThis
ConveyThis has the widest variety of languages of any translation plugin in the WordPress directory, with over 38 language controls and growing. ConveyThis makes it very easy to integrate into a WP website and enable more than 100 languages.
ConveyThis uses automatic machine translation to translate your entire website and adds a customizable button to switch languages. Within minutes, you have a working, SEO-friendly multilingual website that follows Google’s best practices for multilingual sites.
The plugin automatically detects website content and translates everything from page text to attributes, alt text, meta descriptions, and even page URLs. All translations are viewable and editable through a single interface, or you can hire professional translators directly through the service.
There is both a free and a paid plan. With the free plan, you can translate up to 2,500 words into one language. The paid plans use subscription-based billing, which means you pay monthly for as long as you use the service. Paid plans start at €4 per month for one language and up to 10,000 words.
ConveyThis is fully compatible with all WordPress themes and plugins, including WooCommerce. Unlike Google Translate, it doesn’t redirect to third-party sites and properly indexes all translated pages so search engines can find them.
This is important for SEO purposes, as allowing search engines to index your pages in different languages can help you to drive more traffic from Google, Bing and others. Overall, ConveyThis may not be as well as known multilingual plugins, but the quality of translation makes it worth checking out.
2. WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin)
WPML is the oldest and best-known multilingual plugin, and although it’s almost 20 years old, it’s still regularly updated and expanded with new functions.
You can easily manually translate content via the WordPress editor if this is your preferred method. Whenever you add a new post in the main language, you will see the option to create translations for your article in the right-hand sidebar.
WPML offers automatic translation powered by WPML AI, Google, DeepL, and Microsoft. This combination gives you quality, affordability, and speed. You can translate your entire site automatically or use the feature for specific posts and pages, then review and add a human touch to machine translations.
The plugin supports translating all texts of themes/plugins, menus, widgets, taxonomies, custom fields, custom post types (including WooCommerce products), and content created with page builders.
For SEO, WPML provides complete optimization. You can define the URL structure with three options:
- subdirectory (yoursite.com/en/content)
- subdomain (vi.yoursite.com/content)
- parameters (yoursite.com/content?lang=en)
Additionally, you can change the URL slug for any content and work with SEO plugins like Yoast SEO or RankMath. WPML does not offer a free version. Instead, it offers two paid versions: WPML Blog at $29 and WPML CMS at $79 (annual subscription) or $195 (lifetime use).
What makes WPML stand out is its reliable support, available 6 days per week, 19 hours per day, in 9 languages. The development team works proactively to ensure smooth operation, releasing updates ahead of WordPress versions and responding immediately to security reports. It’s one of the most widely used and well-known translation plugins for a reason!
3. Polylang Multilingual WordPress Plugin
In addition to WPML, Polylang is another widely used plugin for language-switching on WordPress sites. Polylang is fully integrated with WordPress and uses only built-in core features (taxonomies), which helps maintain site performance while supporting multiple languages.
There’s no limit to the number of languages you can add, and WordPress language packs are automatically downloaded when available. Polylang primarily gives you the option to manually translate your content when editing pages.
Polylang’s user interface works similarly to WPML – you can translate content directly on the editing page. Once you’ve created a page in the main language, you can tap the “+” button in the right sidebar to create translated versions.
With Polylang, you can translate most content types on your website, even in the free version:
- All posts, pages, media, categories, tags
- Custom post types and custom taxonomies
- Menus and widgets
For SEO, Polylang allows you to use subdirectories, subdomains or separate domains for content URLs. You can even use different domain names for each translation version. The plugin integrates well with Yoast SEO and All In One SEO Pack, and automatically links to relevant URLs with menu items, categories and more.
The Pro version adds valuable features like duplicate/synchronize content across translations, improved Block Editor integration, language switcher blocks, and DeepL machine translation.
Polylang is available for free in the WordPress Plugin directory, with three Pro packages: Polylang Pro for €99.00, Polylang for WooCommerce is also €99.00, or Polylang Pro for WooCommerce which is €139.00.
Conclusion
We’ve provided a brief look at the plugins you can opt for when deciding to create a multilingual WordPress website. A translation plugin is mandatory to create multilingual content, and many people opt to use WPML and Polylang as they’re the most well-known. However, ConveyThis is another alternative that may be worth checking out.
