Background of the issue:
I am trying to configure my website, hidden link, using WPML. The default language is German, and I want English to be displayed automatically for all non-German speaking countries.
Symptoms:
When I test the website using different online services, it always displays the German site instead of the English version for non-German speaking countries.
Questions:
What are the settings needed to display the English version of the site for non-German speaking countries?
How can I test the language settings to ensure the correct version of the site is displayed?
Can you test the site and tell me what you see when you type in hidden link
further it is necessary hidden link leads to german, because the language is used in existing funnels. if someone visits piano.university from outside Germany/Switzerland/Austria, with any other language (english, spanish, italian, etc.) must be redirected to hidden link when just typing hidden link .
However, anything further than that is not possible through WPML I'm afraid, for advanced automatic redirects you need to use any of the solutions such as https://wpml.org/plugin-functionality/geotargeting/.
Hi Bruno,
I see you are located in Croatia, right?
What I would need is just a fallback rule: If browser language is not German --> Redirect to English.
How do I do this? Or is this already active?
Languages: English (English )German (Deutsch )French (Français )
Timezone: Europe/Zagreb (GMT+01:00)
Yes, I am based in Croatia, but I have English set as my browser language. As for the fallback, WPML’s built-in “Redirect based on browser language” can’t do exactly that fallback rule.
The WPML feature works like this:
- It redirects only if there is an exact match between the browser language and one of your site languages.
- If there’s no match, it does nothing — it does not fall back to a specific language.
Man, can you please help me solve my problem? Please read my questions. I am shortly before giving WPML back and go with Polylang. It is really annoying.
Tell me how to solve it.
Languages: English (English )German (Deutsch )French (Français )
Timezone: Europe/Zagreb (GMT+01:00)
Hi,
Thank you for your patience. I want to give you a clear and honest overview of what is technically possible with WPML and what is not, based on your requirements.
Regarding automatic redirection: WPML’s built-in language redirect works only when the visitor’s browser language exactly matches one of the languages configured on the site. It does not provide a native “fallback” rule such as “if browser language is not German, then redirect to English”. For languages that do not match (for example Italian, Spanish, etc.), WPML will show the site’s default language instead of performing a forced fallback to English.
WPML does not support a mixed structure where the default language uses a directory while another language has no directory. Because of that, the following URL structure is not possible with WPML:
- English (as default) using /en/
- German without a /de/ directory
Your requirement is understandable, but it goes beyond what WPML provides out of the box. This is how WPML is designed and not an issue with your configuration.
I hope this explanation helps clarify the platform’s behavior so you can make an informed decision about how you would like to proceed.
