Background of the issue:
I am trying to provide a button (link) on the Japanese news page of my site, hidden link, to allow users to view the page in English. However, I am unable to prevent the link from pointing to the Japanese page.
Symptoms:
The link intended to direct users to the English version of the news page is instead pointing to the Japanese page.
Questions:
How can I configure a link to direct users from the Japanese news page to the English version using WPML?
While you are in the backend of the site, after switching to the secondary language from the top black bar, you should be able to navigate to "Pages" > find the page where the button exists > hover your mouse over it and select "Edit with Beaver Builder".
This way, you might be able to use Beaver Builder for the translation, and then you can click the button > and edit the URL > then save the page.
Good thought. But I already tried that. And when that failed, I saved the button and embedded it with the fl_builder shortcode. But no matter what, the URL is changed to the language of the page.
1. Share with me the URL of the translated version of the page. I prefer the direct URL to the WordPress-edit page or Beaver Builder edit page of the translated version.
2. Confirm that a website backup was created.
3. Let me know the URL that should be used for that button.
4. Share the site credentials in the private fields I am enabling below.
So, I want to go back a bit to make sure I am on the correct path. Initially, we started this ticket talking about the URL not working correctly for the button that you used. Practically, you used a specific URL for that button in the backend, but it was still displaying a different URL on the front-end.
I hope I understood this correctly.
Now that we removed the button (I understand we don't need it anymore) and we need a redirect, why don't we use a plugin like Redirection (https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/) to create a redirect for that specific URL that you shared?
Wouldn't that work better for this case?
Please let me know if there's anything I'm missing here, or maybe I did not understand your last request correctly?
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I only remove the button because it wasn’t helpful, not because we don’t need it. On the staging site, you can see the page as we would like it: hidden link. And you can also see the circular logic of the button pointing back to itself instead of the English language page. A redirect is an interesting idea, but because we still need the page on both the Japanese and English language site it doesn’t help. Does this make sense?
So, I think the issue is due to the fact that "/news" was being used as the link of that button instead of a direct URL: hidden link
Now, I tried to change that in the editor, and it seems it is saved now: hidden link
However, there's a chance there's still some caching that doesn't allow the changes to be published on the site.
I cleared Beaver Builder caching, and I also tried to clear caching from here: hidden link
But there's a chance there's more caching that needs to be cleared - either on the server side, or from the WP backend - from areas that I might be missing or I might not have access to.
Could you test using this direct link for the button on the live site, on the translated version of the news page: hidden link
Another option is to create a redirect, as it shouldn't affect SEO because Google will see there's a redirect there. If we have a page in the secondary language, but that page doesn't have any content for that language, I think a redirect might be pretty user friendly. Or you don't even need to redirect, you can change the URL in the menu in order to send that button straight to the EN version of the page: hidden link
Another option is to translate the articles and serve them like they are served on the main default language.
I hope that you will find all this information helpful.