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How To Build Multilingual Sites with WPBakery Page Builder and WPML

Dario
Updated
May 24, 2022

WPBakery page builder is one of the most popular WordPress page builders. It allows you to build your pages in a visual way, using its intuitive drag-and-drop interface. It is also bundled with many popular themes.

On This Page

Getting Started

Start by installing and activating the following plugins:

  • WPBakery page builder plugin
  • WPML core plugin and WPML String Translation add-on

If you’re new to WPML, check out our Getting Started Guide. It quickly walks you through different translation options you can use.

How To Translate WPBakery Pages Using WPML

WPBakery is compatible with WPML’s Translate Everything mode. If you choose this mode when setting up WPML, all of your WPBakery page content will be automatically translated as you add or edit it.

If you want to decide yourself which of your content gets translated, choose Translate Some mode when you set up WPML.

To translate your site’s content using the Translate Some mode:

  1. On your list of pages, click the plus icon under the language and next to the page that you want to translate.
  2. You’ll be taken to WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor. You can choose between automatically translating your content or manually inputting the translations for each sentence.
  3. Click Complete once you’re done with all your translations.
Translating a page built with the WPBakery Page Builder in WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor

You should now be able to view your default language and secondary language pages on the front-end.

Page in default language

Page translated to Polish

You can find detailed explanations of both translation methods in our documentation about translating page builder content.

All the Current Translatable WPBakery Page Builder Modules

WPML supports translating text in the WPBakery Page Builder modules:

  1. Text Block
  2. Separator with Text
  3. Message Box
  4. Hover Box
  5. Single Image
  6. Image Gallery
  7. Image Carousel
  8. Tabs
  9. Tour
  10. Accordion
  11. Pageable Container
  12. Custom Heading
  13. Button
  14. Call to Action
  15. Widgetised Sidebar
  16. Posts Slider
  17. Video Player
  18. Google Maps
  19. Flickr Widget
  20. Progress Bar
  21. Pie Chart
  22. Round Chart
  23. Line Chart
  24. Post Grid
  25. Media Grid
  26. Post Masonry Grid
  27. Masonry Media Grid
  28. Tweetmeme Button
  29. FAQ
  30. WP Search
  31. WP Meta
  32. WP Recent Comments
  33. WP Calendar
  34. WP Tag Cloud
  35. WP Text
  36. WP Recent Posts
  37. WP Categories

Adding Support for the Raw HTML Element

WPML allows you to manually enable the translation of the Raw HTML element.

Enabling the translation of the Raw HTML element might cause issues when sending a page to professional services or using the Advanced Translation Editor locally to translate it. The issue is not technical, but stems from the fact that translators often do not, understandably, understand the code and can break it during translation.

To translate the texts in the Raw HTML element, you must add them to the Custom XML Configuration tab found on the WPML → Settings page. Here is the code snippet:

<wpml-config>
  <shortcodes>
    <shortcode>
      <tag encoding="base64">vc_raw_html</tag>
    </shortcode>
  </shortcodes>
</wpml-config>

Read more about registering page builder modules for translation.

Maintaining the WPBakery Page Builder Compatibility With WPML

We have prepared a developer’s documentation that explains how the WPBakery Page Builder works with WPML. Read more about updating the language configuration file to maintain the compatibility between WPML and WPBakery Page Builder.

Known Issues

WPML works fine with this plugin, but sometimes there could be minor issues we're working on. This is expected as both plugins provide frequent updates.

Current unresolved issues:

You can also search all known issues including previously resolved issues for this plugin.