In this article, I’ll show you the best WordPress translation plugins that you can use to transform your WordPress site into a multilingual site for your international and local customers.
A WordPress translation plugin translates your website content into your customer’s native language, making it easier to consume information and engage on your site.
Translation plugins let you quickly launch a multilingual site that brings a diversified set of customers close to your business. They tend to understand your potential and unique selling point if the language is convenient and understandable to them.
It’s not like simply installing a plugin and thinking it will do everything for you. You need to perform thorough research, and that’s why I’ve formulated the following set of questions to help you in this regard.
- Does the plugin allow for automatic machine translation or self-translation?
- Is the translation plugin SEO-friendly to attract global audiences?
- Can I customize the language switcher to embed it anywhere on the site?
- Is the translation editor user-friendly to perform the desired operations?
- In how many languages can I translate my website’s content? What are all the elements I can convert into other possible languages?
Remember that automatic machine translation might sound convenient, but it can sometimes do wrong translations. So, you will need a self-translation feature to rectify the mistakes and deliver high-quality translated content.
Now let’s get started.
1. Weglot
With more than 40,000 active installs, Weglot is the best WordPress translation plugin. It enables you to translate your WordPress site into 100+ languages of your choice within a few minutes. And the best part is that it does not require any coding skills and is very easy to install.
This translation plugin seamlessly attracts audiences globally to your WordPress site as it is completely optimized for SEO. All your translated web pages are indexed in Google with dedicated URLs.
You can set up how your website content needs to be translated. It allows you to automatically convert to desired languages using machine translation, manually edit/approve or work with professional translators inside the Weglot dashboard.
Key Features –
- It is compatible with platforms like WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.
- It can automatically detect your entire site content, eliminating the burden of frequent maintenance.
- It offers an in-context editor to translate directly within the webpage.
- It allows you to customize the language switcher as per your design needs and requirements.
- It reduces bounce rate, as it can automatically display your site pages in your audience’s language based on their browser settings.
Pricing Plans – It is free up to 2000 words with one translation language and above, which you’ll have to upgrade to the paid plans, starting at $17/month with a 10-day free trial.
2. TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a power-packed, self-hosted WordPress translation plugin that translates all of your website’s content directly from the front end. It is fully compatible with all themes, plugins and easily translates images alt-text to serve relevant content to different site visitors.
It is integrated with GoogleTranslate so that you can automatically translate all the content quickly on the fly. It is optimized to receive high-quality traffic and supports more than 200 languages to target a diversified set of audiences.
This plugin also supports manual translations and offers a live preview of your translated pages as you edit them. It also gives full control over the editor, allowing you to publish only when the translations are fully complete.
Key Features –
- It enables you to translate the entire webpage, including output from shortcodes, forms, and page builders.
- It allows you to easily translate huge blocks of HTML with a single translation by combining multiple translation strings in a translation block.
- It lets you place the language switcher anywhere on your site or even a floating dropdown.
- It allows you to add multiple languages as long as you need your WordPress site to reach a wider audience.
- It enables you to create translator accounts that can readily translate websites without working with WordPress backend, site builders, etc.
- It gives you the freedom to configure different menu items based on multiple languages.
Pricing Plans – It offers 3 major pricing plans, which are as follows –
- The Personal plan costs €79/year, allowing only 1 site. It comes with an SEO pack add-on and multiple packages add-on.
- The Business plan starts at €139/year, allowing for 3 sites. It comes with translator pack add-ons, DeepL Automatic translator add-on, automatic user language detection, and future pro-add-ons.
- The Developer plan costs €199/year, allowing unlimited sites.
All the plans give you access to an advanced translation interface, integration with Google Translate, a flexible language switcher, and 1 year of updates & premium support.
3. MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress is a translation plugin that takes a unique approach to translate your WordPress site. It uses the built-in WordPress multisite network for each language, increasing reliability and providing high performance.
Having a multisite network is a significant advantage as it loads only one language at a time. It supports a huge set of 800 languages, and with the help of a language manager, you can add more languages. It also translates default WordPress content like posts, pages, tags, etc.
You can use top-level domains for each of your language sites. For example, you can use .co.uk domain extension for British English, .fr for french, etc., which helps in quick indexing on Google search.
Key Features –
- It helps in improving the performance of your site by allowing you to add only the needed components.
- It is compatible with popular page builders like Beaver, Elementor, etc.
- It lets you translate custom post types like portfolio, testimonials, etc.
- It enables you to move the translations to trash when you delete any post or page.
- It allows you to drag and drop the languages into custom menus to create a flexible language switcher.
Pricing Plans – It offers 4 pricing plans – The Standard plan costs $99, allowing for 3 languages and 1 multisite. The Pro plan costs $299 for 6 languages and 3 multisite. The Agency plan at $599 allows upto 18 languages and 9 multisite.
If your requirement exceeds more, you can upgrade to the Enterprise plan, in which you can opt for custom solutions. Also, all the plans come with 365 days of updates & premium support along with the renewal price for each pricing plan.
4. WPML
WPML is a versatile WordPress multilingual translation plugin. It has the power to translate web pages, posts, custom types, menus, and also the theme’s texts.
This translation plugin supports 40 languages, but you get the perks of extending your WordPress site visibility by adding even more languages using the WPML language editor.
An interesting feature to highlight is that WPML offers powerful translation management. You can allow your WordPress site users to become translators. It enables you to send the content for translation, assign specific translation jobs and review the status of the translation tasks assigned.
Key Features –
- It is compatible with WooCommerce and lets you run a multilingual store by offering support to all the products, sales, promotions, etc.
- It can show which text requires translation and helps build a full-fledged translated online store.
- It allows you to translate texts even from different plugins using the string translator interface.
- It connects with your third-party translation services, wherein you can send the needed content for translation and publish it once it’s completed.
Pricing Plans The pricing is classified separately into Multilingual blogs, multilingual WordPress, and Multilingual Agency.
The Multilingual blog is priced at $39 followed by the Multilingual CMS for $99. The Multilingual Agency plan costs $199. All the plans support browser language detection, standard translation controls, and translating posts, pages, custom types, tags, WordPress menus, and WooCommerce sites.
5. GTranslate
GTranslate is one of the most popular translation plugins for your WordPress site. It combines both human and automatic translations, which allows you to translate quickly based on your choice.
It helps translate your WordPress site into 100+ languages such that it attracts traction from visitors all around the world. It is cloud-based, so even if you translate your site into multiple languages, the website loading speed will not be affected much.
This plugin offers different types of styles for the visitors to select their preferred language. But you need to upgrade to its paid plans to access the best SEO features that make your site search-engine friendly.
Key Features –
- It offers integration with Google Analytics which helps in giving you meaningful insights.
- It translates websites, posts, themes, plugins, categories, tags, etc.
- It supports lazy loading for language flags to amplify their performance on your site.
- It automatically switches the language based on the visitor’s browsing history.
- It is compatible with Yoast SEO plugins, which means you can translate meta keywords, descriptions, sitemaps, etc., to boost visibility.
Pricing Plans – It offers a free plan that gives you access to all languages, machine translation, unlimited words, and pageviews.
The Paid plans start at $17.99/month and go upto $37.99/month. You can enjoy advanced features like search engine indexing, editing translations, URL translation, and language hosting.
6. Polylang
With over 6,00,000+ active users, Polylang is a powerful WordPress translation plugin that facilitates creating a bilingual or multilingual site. You can use as many languages as you want. It also perfectly integrates with content duplication across languages for an effective workflow.
It guarantees high performance as it only uses WordPress’s built-in core taxonomies. It gives more flexibility as it can translate custom post types, custom taxonomies, widgets, navigation, menus, and URLs.
Key Features –
- It provides a customizable language switcher as a widget or navigation menu.
- It allows you to set the language by the content, code in the URL, domain per language, or using one different subdomain.
- It is compatible with major SEO plugins and cache plugins.
- It enables you to automatically copy the categories, post tags, meta when adding a new post or page translation.
Pricing Plans- The base plugin is free to download. To access advanced features and Premium support, you can upgrade to the Pro version costing €99 for a single site.
7. Prisna Translate
Prisna GWT is a free WordPress translator plugin. It enables you to use Google’s automatic translation service to translate your site into 100+ languages. It is easy to set up, user-friendly and allows you to use it as a widget or as a shortcode.
This plugin lets you translate your entire website, menus, footers, sidebars, and individual pages via a shortcode. One important aspect to remember is that the automatic translations can’t be edited and slightly lacks SEO features.
Key Features –
- It lets you display the language switcher using the sidebar widget or embed it within the content using shortcode.
- It stores all the settings in a single database record that doesn’t impact your site’s page loading speed.
- It allows you to import and export the settings to transfer configurations easily.
Pricing Plans – It is free to use.
8. Babble
Babble is a free and open-source WordPress translation plugin that hosts simple yet powerful features. It has an optimized interface such that you can access all the menus and options required for quickly translating your site content.
To make your job easier, Babble takes it to the attention of your translators that the post is ready. Next, it displays two versions of the WordPress visual editor – the original content and the other interface with all elements that a translator needs before publishing it live.
Key Features –
- It lets you create a new translation of any existing or new page.
- It enables you to run your WordPress site in numerous languages.
- It allows you to embed the language switcher widget to your site’s sidebar.
- It is designed to be compatible with core WordPress functions and has an active open source community to assist further development.
Pricing Plans – It is free to use.
Wrapping Up
Though you put in lots of effort and create a website embedded with stunning elements, if a visitor can’t understand it, your site cannot serve its true purpose of fulfilling the needs of your target audience.
Now that you know about the different translation plugins for your WordPress sites start building conversion-friendly sites that ultimately speak customers’ language.
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