The easiest way to translate your WordPress website is with a multilingual plugin, like WPML. Among WordPress users, WPML is the most popular multilingual plugin, with over 1,000,000+ active installations.
Translating your website involves a number of steps; you need to decide which languages to translate into, choose what pages to translate, and make sure translations are accurate.
With WPML, you can translate into as many languages as you want, translate specific content (or your entire website) and create accurate translations that don’t need to be reviewed.
How to Translate with WPML
In this tutorial, we’ll cover everything you need to translate your WordPress website with WPML:
- Setup WPML
- Translate Your Content
- Review Translations
- Translate Everything Automatically
- Add a Language Switcher
1. Setup WPML
To begin, start by installing the WPML plugin. Once activated, WPML will guide you through a setup wizard to configure some basic settings.
Here are the main settings you’ll configure during the setup wizard:
Translation context
Tell WPML what your website is about and who it’s for to get automatic translations personalized to your niche.
Target languages
Choose from over 65 pre-configured languages, or add your own custom languages.
URL format
Organize translations under subdomains, subfolders, or different domains per language.
2. Translate Your Content
WPML includes a translation dashboard where you can choose what content to translate. This includes pages, posts, custom posts, forms, WooCommerce products, and any other content on your website.
To translate any content, just go to WPML → Translation Dashboard, select the content you want to translate, and send for translation.
To get the best translations, we recommend translating automatically with WPML’s most accurate AI translator – PTC (Private Translation Cloud. Here’s a quick video explaining how PTC works.
PTC is like your own team of expert translators with a deep understanding of your content and niche. It can create translations that match your language style, formality, and terminology, and is backed by our translation quality guarantee – if you’re not satisfied with PTC’s translations, you’ll get a full refund.
Besides automatic translation, WPML offers three additional translation methods:
Translate by Yourself
Manually translate your content using WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor.
Other Website Users
Assign the “translator” role to users of your website and send them content for translation.
Translation Services
Send content to professional translation services vetted by WPML.
To select any of these options, just choose the corresponding option when sending content for translation.
3. Review Translations
Although PTC can create excellent translations, you can always review them before publishing to your website. Just select the Wait for review option when sending content for translation.
Once translations are ready, you’ll be able to review and edit them using WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor.
Once done making changes, WPML will publish translations to your website.
4. Translate Everything Automatically
Once you’re comfortable using PTC, you can automatically translate your entire website into multiple languages with just one click. Just go to WPML → Translation Dashboard and click the toggle at the top of the dashboard.
Moving forward, every time you publish new content (or update existing content) WPML will automatically create new translations, ensuring your website is always fully translated.
5. Add a Language Switcher
To help visitors change to their preferred language, WPML lets you add a language switcher to your website. You can add a switcher in multiple locations, including:
Menus
Widgets
Templates
Post content
By default, WPML provides a basic design for each language switcher. However, you can always add your own custom styling to match switchers with your website’s design. This includes:
- Customizing flags
- Setting background color
- Changing font
- And more…
How Much Does WPML Cost?
WPML’s most popular plan – Multilingual CMS, costs €99 per year and includes all the features you need to create a multilingual website:
- Translate to 65+ languages
- Access all WPML add-ons
- Built-in multilingual SEO
- Support & updates
Besides these features, the plan also comes with 90,000 credits for automatic translation. This amount is usually enough to automatically translate most websites into 1-2 languages at no extra cost. If you have a big website with a lot of content, you can always buy more credits at affordable rates.
Get Started with WPML
Ready to start translating with WPML? Create an account and try WPML risk-free for 30 days.
