FAQ

Starting with WPML 4.3, WPML uses .mo files to deliver String Translation without loading the database. For this to work, WPML needs to be able to write to the languages folder whenever you translate strings. If you are seeing a message that tells you that WPML cannot write .mo files, in 99% of the times, […]

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).

After purchasing a WPML account, you should receive an email with your account information. Sometimes, you might not be able to find it in your main inbox. This page offers some suggestions on finding this email. If you are having difficulties finding the email with your account information, make sure the email address you are […]

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 […]

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. There are three types of releases, also called “channels”: Production – this is the default channel and includes only the official, stable releases. It is […]

Does your site feel slow? Here are a few steps that you can take to speed it up. Update Update WordPress, the theme and all plugins PHP 7 Make sure that you are running PHP 7 and above Cache Use a caching plugin Host Use a fast host Fast website Updating WordPress and all plugins […]

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. This tutorial is intended for developers. If you are looking […]

There could be moments when you are translating your WordPress site with WPML and you need some help. Fortunately, as a WPML license owner, you always have the possibility to come to our forum and open a ticket. However, there are some simple steps which will help us solve your issue faster and easier. Everything […]

If after following all the instructions from our checklist before opening a ticket in WPML support, you are still having issues or struggling to translate your site, it may be time to come to our support forum. The first thing you will notice is that our system will ask you to describe what are you […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

Once you save the options for your site’s default language or a custom language, it is not possible to change their language code. If you want to use a different code for a specific language, for example, jp instead of ja for Japanese, or if you want to change the language code for a specific […]

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 […]

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 […]

You can use WPML for whatever use and even modify the code. The number of sites you can register WPML on depends on your account type: Multilingual Blog – 1 site Multilingual CMS – 3 sites Multilingual Agency – unlimited sites WPML is licensed under GPL. This means that you are free to do whatever you […]

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.

WPML 4.0 version introduced the Advanced Translation Editor, which comes with a built-in machine translation feature. Advanced Translation Editor allows you to use machine translation for translating the whole page at once or field-by-field.

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 […]

WPML provides a reset feature that deletes WPML tables from the site’s database and deactivates the plugin. WPML reset cannot be undone. We recommend that you create a backup of your site before resetting WPML. The reset action does not delete translated images, translated posts, and translated taxonomies. It only affects translation and language information […]

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 […]

There is a large number of plugins that are compatible with WPML. We have created this list with different categories to help you in finding the right solution for your needs.

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 […]

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 for […]

Sometimes, you might have a lot of taxonomy terms to translate. For example, you might be running an established blog, a content-heavy site or an e-commerce store. In this case, you could find yourself with far too many taxonomies to translate one by one. Luckily, there’s a simple way to translate all taxonomy terms at […]

WPML 4.0 version introduced the possibility to translate custom taxonomy base slugs. 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 all of them, including the base slug (“book-genres”) of the “Book Genres” taxonomy itself. To enable this, go […]

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.

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 you have a page that is a translation of another page you can link them. To link page to their translation use the Connect with translations feature. Use the following steps to link already translated pages: Open the translated version of a page for editing Set the language of the page in the Language box . Click […]

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 […]

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 WPML support team can nearly always help you resolve issues faster when we know the theme and plugins that you use. The WPML plugin can send us a report of the plugins and theme that you are using. When this option is selected, we will include your currently active theme and plugins on your […]

This is not possible at this moment with WPML. Once you have set any page as your Front or Post page on the Settings -> Reading page, WPML will immediately assign their translations to secondary languages. You can even notice that if you delete and remove from the trash a page that was selected as […]

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 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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]