So, you’re thinking of going multilingual, aren’t you? Congrats on that decision! Growing your potential audience to international clients is always a good idea.
But have you thought about your WordPress language switcher?
Making your site multilingual entails more than just translating your website’s content. Of course, the translation is still the main part of the process, but making sure the translated content is correct, SEO friendly, and easily accessible to your visitors is just as important to the user experience.
Having a good functioning language switcher is essential to the user when working with a multilingual WordPress website.
What is a Language Switcher?
A language switcher is a tiny button with a big impact.
A language switcher is a clickable selector that lets your website visitors switch between two or more languages (that you provide) and choose the one they want to navigate your site into. This is extremely helpful for international websites and makes visitors enjoy a much better experience on the site.
So, let’s say you have a website that can be displayed in 3 languages: English, French, and Romanian. You have your whole content translated into the 3 languages and now all the user has to do is select their preferred language from those provided to display your site. This way, the users can comfortably scroll through your site in a language they know, or maybe even in their own native language.
Language switchers are typically displayed in a corner of the website or as part of a menu or a widget. They can also take the form of dropdowns and can display full language names, language codes, or flags.
What Are Your Options?
There are quite a few ways for you to create a multi language website, but not all of the available tools come with the option of easily adding a language switcher to your menu, footer, or any other place you’d like it to be.
Your best options for adding a functional and accessible language switcher in a fairly easy manner are:
1. TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a visual translation plugin, with an easy-to-use front-end translation editor and the capability to translate 100% of a website’s content.
Among many multilingual functionalities and customization options, the plugin offers 3 types of language switchers to display on your site and customize to your needs: a floating language selector that follows the user on every page, a menu item switcher, and a shortcode switcher that allows it to be placed pretty much anywhere on the site (such as in a widget or in the footer).
2. WPML
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This article was written by Kyla and originally published on WPExplorer.