I hope this message finds you well. I am writing to inquire about the best practices for changing the default language of my website. Originally, I built my site in English, as I am more proficient in it than in German. However, due to requirements, I now need to switch the default language from English to German.
Could you please provide me with guidance and advice on how to perform this change smoothly and effectively without encountering errors? I aim to ensure that the transition is seamless for my users and that no content is adversely affected during the process.
I would greatly appreciate any tips, recommended steps, or documentation that could assist me in this endeavor.
Thank you for your time and assistance. I look forward to your prompt response.
Languages: English (English )Spanish (Español )Italian (Italiano )
Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+01:00)
Hello!
I'll help you get started while a supporter takes your case:
By default changing the default language shouldn't be a problem and it would mainly change the way the domains are shown in the front-end (if site.com was English first, now it will show the German content and site.com/en will show the English version).
Beware, of course, that doing this means that if you had sites crawled with a certain URL, you will want to re-crawl them on your search console by just resending the sitemap.
Then, just to be sure you can also do the following:
Go to WPML -> Support -> Troubleshooting and press the following buttons:
• "Clear the cache in WPML"
• "Remove ghost entries from the translation tables"
• "Fix element_type collation"
• "Set language information"
• "Fix post type assignment for translations"
That should be all.
NOTE:
As precaution, please take a backup from BEFORE you make this change and one afterwards, just so you can have "checkpoints" you can return to. even better you can try this on a staging site first and check if there is something strange happening afterwards.
There aren't really best practice to change the default language. Just bear in mind that changing default language doesn't mean changing the original language pages. That is, if you first translated from English to German, you'll have to keep editing the translation from English to German and not the other way around (for existing translation).
Also, internal links might be not automatically updated after the change so you might have to edit them manually
Lastly, please consider the SEO impact, if you change your default language all your English content will have /en/ in the URL so you might need to put redirect in place.
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