Changing the Default Language of our site

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Supporter timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-07:00)

This topic contains 8 replies, has 1 voice.

Last updated by Bobby 3 months ago.

Assisted by: Bobby.

Author	Posts
April 14, 2026 at 10:32 am #17968115
dupratS	We would like your guidance what is the right way to achieve this. We are changing our site vahana.fr to vahanahorse.com. The site will remain the same, however. The home page now defaults to french but we want it to default to English. So french speaker will have to select french when they get to our site. At the same time we do not want all of the links to change (if we can avoid that, for SEO and advertising link reasons) meaning: while for example this product in french has this URL structure hidden link it will become hidden link this is the same product in english has this URL structure hidden link it will become hidden link is this possible to achieve or will this cause trouble? or do we need to redo all out URL structures ? we hope to avoid that. thank you for your help.
April 14, 2026 at 12:03 pm #17968535
dupratS	not sure what has happened. I asked to speak with a human. not sure if I need to write that now. just standing by to hear back. thank you
April 14, 2026 at 10:54 pm #17970101
Bobby WPML Supporter since 04/2015 Languages: English (English ) Timezone: America/Los_Angeles (GMT-07:00)	Hi there, Just to make sure I fully understand. Are you removing the different domain per language option? Meaning you are going from vahana.fr and vahana.com to vahano.fr --> French vahana.fr/en/ -> English
April 15, 2026 at 11:43 am #17971169
dupratS	Hello Bobby, Sorry if I wasn't clear. our current site is vahana.fr We will change it to vahanahorse.com our ask was if we wanted to not loose our links was there a way to change the default language from our current french to english. However in the mean time we have decided that we need English to be our primary and default language so when we add other languages that the translations are from english to whatever the other languages are. So in that case we imagine the URL structure for English will have to be hidden link (english the default language) while other languages will have hidden link hidden link < -- for spanish hidden link < -- for italian (for example) meaning so we know we will lose all our links and we will just bite the bullet and do that. So the new questions is. What is the correct way to do that so we can ideally not have to re-translate everything we have done so far. do we start the process here? hidden link will this process honor our translations and simply change the URL structure? If not then perhaps there is another way to achieve that?
April 16, 2026 at 5:46 pm #17975215
Bobby Supporter	Understood now and thank you for the detailed explanation! Yes, that is correct, once you switch the URLs will change and unfortunately there is no way around that. However, your translations and their connections will automatically change so they will not be affected. Once you go to WPML->Languages and change your default language EN will be under your site's default domain. IF You don't change the domain and it stays as vahana.fr it would look like this vahana.fr -> English vahana.fr/fr/ -> French. If you do change it to vahanahorse.com it will be vahanahorse.com -> English vahanahorse.com/fr/ -> French Unless you use different domains per langauge (which I'd recommend here) and switch to vahanahorse.com-> English vahanahorse.fr -> French (in this case your FR links will remain the same which could save some SEO issues)
April 20, 2026 at 6:46 am #17979408
dupratS	I've change the default language to english on our staging site to test run the switch. this caused many issues of course. But I had expected that the product would also change from french being the original product page to the english being that. now when I go to edit the new "original" language product page . (now the english one) it seems to still think the french is the original. as the english is full of padlocks not allowing changes. it there a way to flip that for all the products or do I have to do each product one by one? can you tell me the other things to look out for that I need to update that I might not see or know about right away? thank you
April 22, 2026 at 6:14 am #17985921
Bobby Supporter	Thank you for updating me with your results! So now that the language is changed, you will effectively created from the new default language and translate into the "translation" That being said, existing content will not change which side of the languages is the original language and translation. For example what you notice in the products you can also see in pages. If you edit a page you will see that it most likely says that the page is a translation of (the old default language) This is expected. It can be manually changed but should not cause any issues if kept this way. I recorded a video to show the steps visually on how to do this: hidden link - Edit the page or product - Click on the dropdown "this is a translation" and select none - Now click on "connect with translations" and connect to the translation - Make sure to check the box assigning this language you are working on as the default language of the pair. Let me know your results, please.
May 5, 2026 at 11:33 am #18013692
dupratS	Thank you I was not able to follow your zoom . everything was in spanish I think.
May 5, 2026 at 7:36 pm #18015207
Bobby Supporter	You can see the steps in details on the following documentation https://wpml.org/faq/how-to-link-already-translated-pages/ I also, re recorded the video and walked you through with voice and an English backend. hidden link

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