FAQ

Things that you can check when getting an error message like this: Do you have a working internet connection? Can the webserver access that host specified in the error message (api.wpml.org) via http (you may want to check this with your web server administrator or host provider. If your server has problems resolving the api.wpml.org […]

Tags: Install, installation, Installer, registration, troubleshooting  

WPML includes its own automatic update and install process. After you install the base WPML plugin once, you can auto-install its components and receive upgrades directly to the WordPress admin. In this page First time WPML installation Automated updates for WPML Registering WPML to receive automatic updates Automatic WPML registration using PHP for easy moves […]

Tags: Install  

By default, you should use the stable and fully tested versions of WPML. However, in some cases, you may want to test versions that have not yet been officially released. Please note that the feature described on this page is part of the upcoming 3.8.0 version of WPML. Until the official release, you can test […]

Tags: beta, Install  

Every plugin that you add to your WordPress site will add execution time and database queries. In this tutorial, we explain how to check where execution time comes from. With this information, you and WPML support team can find bottlenecks and improve your site’s performance. Install and activate the Debug Objects plugin We will use […]

Tags: performance  

Sometimes, our supporters may ask you to provide them with a copy of your site. They will do this when issues you are reporting need to be investigated in greater detail. Using a copy of your site is the safest and most convenient way to debug problems. There are multiple WordPress plugins that allow you […]

Tags: support  

Lucky for us, WordPress has anticipated situations where things don’t quite go as planned and included debug facilities which will show you what the problem is. Have a look at the debugging WPML page to see how to activate the different debug resources and where to report problems.

Tags: debug, troubleshooting  

If you add a sidebar language switcher to a site using the Twenty Seventeen theme, there is a slight visual issue in its appearance. This happens due to some styling conflicts and can be easily fixed using the following solution. Go to the WPML -> Languages page and add the following CSS rules to the Additional CSS section of the Language switcher […]

Untranslated post object and page link fields do not show on the back-end of the duplicated post despite the fact that the post is associated with the correct value for the post object and page link custom fields in the database. Please note that this is not a bug and it does not affect the functionality. All the textual elements will be presented […]

The language controls on the WooCommerce Products page are hidden by default. When enabled, they can increase the loading time of the page. The recommended place for translating products is from the WooCommerce Multilingual products dashboard. The dashboard and the Products tab can be reached in the WordPress administration area, by going to the WPML->WooCommerce Multilingual page. You can […]

Tags: products, woocommerce  

If you add a footer language switcher to a site using the Twenty Seventeen theme, it is not visible on the front-end. It is actually rendered, however, the default styling settings make it not visible. Let’s take a look at two simple solutions to make the footer language visible in the Twenty Seventeen theme. Feel […]

Sometimes, you will want to show translated breadcrumbs on your Product pages and have them include the Shop link. Because of how WooCommerce works, this functionality requires two things to be set-up: You need to set your permalink product base to your shop slug. You need to set the product base, configured on the Settings->Permalinks page, to […]

Tags: breadcrumbs, woocommerce  

In order for String Translation to work, your theme (and plugins) must pass texts through translation calls. See this FAQ for how to wrap texts in GetText calls, so that WPML can translate them.

Tags: installation, setup  

You should not bundle WPML with any theme, free or commercial. WPML comes with GPL license, but is also trademarked. In practice, removing all the trademarked material from WPML would be a huge project and is really not recommended. We understand that theme authors want to provide a complete package for multilingual sites for their […]

Tags: themes  

A 500 error means that there is an error in the PHP code that your site runs. When errors are not caught, the server stops everything and returns page that says “500 error”. Different servers are configured to display these 500 errors slightly differently, but they all mean the same – there is an unhanded […]

Tags: debug  

WPML doesn’t include a built-in interface to machine translation. WPML is a tool that lets you translate your site and include multilingual content. It also includes an interface to translation services. From our understanding of how Google treats machine translation, we believe that Google will very much not appreciate seeing machine translation in your site’s […]

Tags: Translation  

First, thank you again for buying WPML from us. We’ve made it easy for you to get a tax receipt, with everything needed for your accounting. Log in to your WPML account and click on the link saying ‘Account Settings‘. Fill-in the text field where it says ‘Company’. This information will show in your tax […]

Tags: Account  

You can use WPML on as many sites as you like, for whatever use and even modify the code. WPML is licensed under GPL. This means that you are free to do whatever you want with the code.  

Tags: license  

When you activate WPML, it adds language attributes to all existing content. If the activation process is interrupted, some content may be missing because it has no language. Read this FAQ for instructions on how to repeat the initialization process and get all your content to show again.

In order to expedite handling your support requests, you can give to the WPML support team debug information from your site. This information includes general info about the server configuration, installed versions of WordPress, plugins and the theme. None of this information is private and does not include any data that may be used to […]

Tags: debug  

Some plugins use a special configuration file in order to be fully compatible with WPML. For many plugins, this configuration is stored on a WPML repository and the file is retrieved when the new plugin is activated. In case caching issues prevent this from happening you can run this manually. Go to Dashboard -> Updates. Scroll […]

If your widgets include translatable strings, you’ll be able to edit the translation with WPML, but translations are not guaranteed to display on the site. Method 1) Using WordPress’ filters WPML uses the standard WordPress filters and translates content that you filter. All the standard WordPress widgets apply filters by default. When you create your […]

Currently, you can translate the slugs of taxonomy terms but it is not possible to translate the base taxonomy slugs with WPML. For example, let’s say you have a custom taxonomy called “Book Genres”, with some terms like “Science Fiction” and “Biographical”. WPML allows you to translate this terms’ slugs (“science-fiction”, “biographical”), but the main taxonomy […]

To make custom types in WordPress multilingual, your custom types need to be declared according to the recommended WordPress procedure: Make sure they’re registered on the ‘init‘ hook Never use a GetText call for the custom post type Always use the constants TRUE and FALSE. 0 and 1 may not work. Check the WordPress Codex […]

WPML can serve different languages from different domains or sub-domains. For this to work, some setup is required in your web server. You can find the detailed how-to tutorial about this topic in our blog post about how to use WPML with different domains per language.

Tags: domains, setup  

Important update for string languages, since WPML 3.3 Since WPML 3.3, you can translate strings from any language to any other language. You can assign the source language to specific strings or to entire string contexts. Until WPML 3.3, you could only translate strings from English to other languages. If you are running a site […]

If your site shows question marks for non-English characters, most chances are your database character encoding is different than UTF-8. If you’re using PHPMyAdmin, the structure of your wp_posts table should look like this: If you see a different value for the collation, it means that the character encoding is wrong. This will cause text […]

Tags: charset, utf8  

If you can’t get past the language configuration wizard, there’s probably something wrong between WPML, your theme and other plugins. This FAQ will help you identify these problems, so that we can find a solution and get you going. 1. Enable a PHP debug file When you activate WPML, it creates language tables in your […]

The WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway extension features a Test mode for testing the payment system before activating it on a live production site. When the Test mode is enabled, the extension adds a test message to the front-end output. This message can be translated using WPML’s String Translation, but the issue is that these translations are not displayed on the […]

Tags: stripe, woocommerce  

Many themes are already multilingual-ready. Read this FAQ for common pitfalls and how you can avoid them when creating new WordPress themes.

Tags: Guide  

WPML has two features which are great for translating, but slow down your site – only for you (not for visitors). You can disable them. You can find these two options at the bottom of the WPML -> String Translation page. The first option is: “Track where string appear on the site” With this, WPML keeps a record […]

When you enable languages in directories, you’re telling WPML to arrange translations in what appears like different virtual directories. For example: www.example.com www.example.com/es/ www.example.com/ja/ For this to work, Apache’s rewrite module must be enabled and the site needs to use a ‘fancy’ permalink structure (e.g., anything different than the default permalinks). Then, go to WPML->Languages […]

Tags: setup  

If your translated pages appear slower than the original pages, there are a few things you can do. First, be sure to check where problems are coming from. You can learn how to use Debug Objects plugin and identify performance issues in our FAQ on debugging performance problems. When you see an unexpectedly large number […]

Many themes and plugins save texts in the wp_options table. WPML makes them translatable via the String Translation module. Let’s start at the end. Supposing that your code has something like: <?php echo(get_option(“footer_text”)) ?> To translate this text, you don’t need to edit anything in the code. You need to enable WPML’s String Translation module […]

Tags: String Translation Support, wp_options  

When you use Safari browser on an Apple computer and download WPML and its add-on plugins’ .zip files, Safari will automatically unzip them. This happens due to Safari’s default behavior. To solve this issue you can either disable this option in Safari or try using a different browser to download WPML and its add-on plugins. To disable […]

Tags: installation, safari