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9 Best WordPress Translation Plugins for Multilingual Websites

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Are you looking for the best WordPress translation plugins?

WordPress is used by millions of non-English websites around the world. You can use WordPress to create a website in any language you want.

However, WordPress does not have the built-in capability to create multilingual websites. Luckily, some powerful WordPress translation plugins let you easily add multilingual content to your site.

In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress translation plugins you can use to create multilingual websites. We will look at their features, pros, and cons to help you pick the best option for your website.

Best WordPress Translation Plugins for Multilingual Websites

How to Create a Multilingual WordPress Website

Most beginners don’t know that you can install WordPress in your own language and use it to make websites in any language.

With the help of plugins, you can create bilingual or multilingual websites. You can even allow your users to translate content using Google Translate.

While many translation plugins are available for WordPress, they can be characterized into two main categories:

Multilingual plugins allow you to manually add multilingual content to your website. The main benefit of these plugins is the quality of your translations will be significantly better than any machine-generated online translation tools.

The second type of WordPress translation plugin uses online translation services for content localization. These plugins don’t require you to write content in multiple languages, but the quality of translations is not as good as it can be.

That being said, let’s look at the best WordPress multilingual plugins and automated translation plugins.

Best WordPress Multilingual Plugins

Unlike automated WordPress translation plugins, these multilingual plugins allow you to manually translate every aspect of your WordPress website, including content, theme, plugins, and more.

Let’s take a look at our top picks for the best WordPress multilingual plugins to easily translate your entire website.

1. TranslatePress

TranslatePress

TranslatePress is a full-fledged WordPress multilingual plugin to translate every aspect of your website. The main feature of TranslatePress is that it allows you to translate directly from the front end.

You can easily switch languages during the translation, and the live preview will change instantly. Another benefit of this approach is that you can translate content, themes, plugins, and even meta-data without changing the interface.

TranslatePress is perfect for manual translations. You can translate yourself or assign the custom translator user role to any user on your site. For example, you can hire professional translators, and these users can translate content without access to the admin area.

If manual translations sound like a lot of work, you can use Google Translate for machine translations. This approach allows you to use AI-powered translations with manual corrections.

The plugin creates SEO-friendly URLs for all languages, which gives you a boost in local SEO results.

To learn more, see our guide on how to easily translate WordPress with TranslatePress.

Pricing: Starting from €89 per year, billed annually (€7.99 per month) for a personal license.

2. WPML

WPML

WPML is one of the most popular WordPress multilingual plugins. It comes with a powerful translation-management system that allows you to translate content, themes, plugins, and more.

WPML offers Multilingual Blog and Multilingual CMS licensing plans. You’ll need the multilingual CMS plan for eCommerce, page builder support, custom fields, managing translation teams, and other features.

It has an easy-to-use interface to add translations and manage multilingual content across your website. WPML supports all post types, taxonomies, custom fields, and strings generated by your WordPress themes and plugins.

It also allows you to connect your website to third-party translation service providers. You can select which content needs to be translated and get it submitted directly to your website.

For detailed instructions, see our step-by-step guide on how to create a multilingual WordPress site with WPML.

Pricing: €39 for the Multilingual Blog plan and €99 for the Multilingual CMS plan.

3. Polylang

Polylang

Polylang is another powerful plugin to easily create a multilingual or bilingual WordPress site. It comes with a simple interface to easily add translations for your posts, pages, custom post types, widgets, and more.

Polylang does not come with support to translate your WordPress theme and plugins. The default plugin doesn’t include eCommerce support, so you will need to purchase a paid addon.

It allows you to set up SEO-friendly URLs for each language and works well with popular WordPress SEO plugins. For language selection, you can add the language switcher to your website using a sidebar widget.

For more details, see our tutorial on how to create a multilingual WordPress site with Polylang.

Pricing: The base plugin is free. You can get the Pro version for €99 with a single site license.

4. Weglot

Weglot

Weglot is a cloud-based website translation platform. It works with WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more, and can get your site into different languages easily.

You will need to enter Weglot API to connect your WordPress site to their platform during the setup. After that, you will choose your preferred language, site language, and the languages you want to add.

You will have to use Weglot’s website to translate all your content, manage translations, and push them to your live website.

Other notable features include SEO-friendly URL support, WooCommerce support, a language switcher button, third-party translation services, and more.

Weglot uses a monthly pricing structure based on the number of languages and translated words. This may make it more expensive for you than some other multilingual WordPress plugins with a fixed yearly license.

Pricing: Starting from €15 per month for one language and 10,000 Words. Their popular PRO plan supports five languages and 200,000 words for €79 per month.

5. MultilingualPress

MultilingualPress

MultilingualPress takes a slightly different approach to creating multilingual websites with WordPress. Instead of running on a normal WordPress install, it uses the built-in WordPress multisite network for each language.

This allows the plugin to efficiently manage content for each language while improving performance by loading one language at a time. It comes with an easy interface to manage your translations from a single dashboard.

It supports posts, pages, custom post types, taxonomies, and more. Due to its architecture, each language can be on its own subdomain, directory, or even a custom domain name.

Pricing: Starting from $99 per year for a single multisite license.

Best Free WordPress Translation Plugins

These free WordPress plugins allow you to translate your website using automated translation services or manually providing translations for some parts of your website.

6. Translate WordPress with GTranslate

Translate WordPress with GTranslate

Translate WordPress with GTranslate is a Google translation plugin for WordPress. It automatically connects to Google Translate API and can fetch translations for any supported languages.

It allows you to add a language switcher to translate your web pages easily, or you can automatically translate content based on the user’s browser language.

The plugin also offers a paid version, which allows you to choose SEO-friendly URLs and let search engines index your translated content.

Pricing: Free. GTranslate paid plans start at $9.99 per month.

7. Multilanguage Translation

Multilanguage Translation

Multilanguage Translation is a free WordPress translation plugin and language switcher. It lets you manually translate pages, posts, widgets, navigation menus, and more.

The plugin comes with dozens of pre-installed languages, and you can also add new languages as you like. Moreover, you can display a modern language switch option on your website with flag icons. It also supports RTL languages.

Pricing: Free. The paid plans start at $39 per year with all premium features and customer support for a year. You can also buy a lifetime plan for $380.

8. Google Website Translator

Google Website Translator

The Google Website Translator plugin allows you to use Google Translate API to translate your website content. It uses the default Google Translate button, which you can display anywhere on your website.

You can select the languages you want to show in the language switcher, which can be displayed using the sidebar widget or an inline shortcode.

The shortcode feature allows you to offer machine translations for specific pages as needed. The translated page will be visible to users when they select the language, or the plugin has the functionality to detect it via their browser settings.

Pricing: Free. You can buy a lifetime plan for $50 that includes free updates and customer support.

9. Loco Translate

Loco Translate

Loco Translate is slightly different than other translation plugins in the list. It allows you to translate WordPress themes and plugins.

If your WordPress theme or plugin is translation-ready, you can use Loco Translate to translate it inside the WordPress dashboard. It uses a simple user interface similar to some other WordPress translation plugins and popular tools, with one column for original strings and the other for translation.

For more details, see our guide on how to translate a WordPress plugin.

Pricing: Free. Loco Pro plans start at $5.95 per month.

Bonus: SeedProd

SeedProd website

SeedProd is the best drag and drop page builder for WordPress. You can use it to easily create custom WordPress themes, page layouts, and landing pages, no coding required.

It makes our list of the best WordPress translation plugins because it comes with a powerful AI Assistant for translating the content on your site. This makes it super easy to create a custom website design in any language.

With the AI Assistant, you can instantly generate headlines, description, body text, and more. Then, in 1-click, you can translate your text into 50+ languages. Choose from languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Korean, Arabic, and much more.

Note that this plugin is only for translating website page copy.

Pricing: SeedProd starts at $39.50 per year. You can purchase the AI Assistant as a separate addon for $39.

What Is the Best WordPress Translation Plugin?

If you are looking for a multilingual WordPress plugin to manually translate content on your website, then we recommend using TranslatePress.

It is extremely beginner friendly and quite easy to use, even for users without experience running multilingual websites. It is optimized for SEO and performance, two features that would benefit your business in the long run.

For automatic WordPress translations, we recommend using the Translate WordPress with the GTranslate plugin. It is easy to use, and even the free version is quite good for automatic translations.

Should I allow search engines to index automated machine translations?

Some translation plugins allow you to make automatic translations available for search engines to index.

These machine translations are not very good. They can be odd and even misleading at times, especially when put side-by-side with content done by professional translators. Allowing search engines to index this low-quality content is a bad idea and can hurt your multilingual seo attempts. Google can identify this content and will consider it spam, which would damage your website’s search rankings.

However, for manual site translations, you should let Google index your translated versions, so you can rank higher in local SEO.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress translation plugins for your multilingual website.

You may also want to see our other guides to improve your multilingual WordPress website.

Best WordPress Guides for Multilingual Websites

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

45 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

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    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
    Every month, our top blog commenters will win HUGE rewards, including premium WordPress plugin licenses and cash prizes.
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  2. Jiří Vaněk says

    I use PolyLang because it has a great integration in Elementor. If someone uses Elementor like I do, there are quite a few quality extension plugins for PolyLang for Elementor blocks. Thanks to this, I was able to convert the website completely into English and Czech. This is what I missed with other plugins and what made it impossible for me to make other elements of the site bilingual in addition to articles and pages. So, for me, PolyLang is really one of the best plugins for multilingual websites.

  3. Moinuddin Waheed says

    having multilingual websites becomes a need at times and knowing small tweaks to achieve is a fantastic idea.
    I used to think that we would need to manually translate the whole website and then turn the website into multilingual.
    Manual translation is good in terms of accuracy but that requires language expert or hiring a language expert.
    But these translation plugins opens the door for a while lot of options.
    Thanks for these multilingual plugin options.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      That is an automatic translation, some sites have multilingual content that they write for their users.

      Admin

  4. Charlie Bavister says

    Out of the 9 plugins, I have tried Weglot and it worked good for us. Will give other plugins also a try.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Glad our recommendation worked for you and hope the other options are helpful as well :)

      Admin

  5. Nick says

    Nice article!

    What I would like to see is a similar comparison specifically for WooCommerce webshops (possibilities for translation of products, categories, tags, global attributes etc. and functions like sending emails in customer’s language, synchronisation of cart across domains etc.)

    Next to specific WooCommerce functions the comparison should take into account the most important aspect ever for e-commerce: a comparison based on website performance. As many other I worked with WPML a lot and in pretty much all cases activating WPML immediately adds an average of 2-3 seconds of loading time.

    Best regards,

    Nick

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Thank you for your recommendation for us to consider when updating the article or for new articles.

      Admin

  6. Jennie West says

    Great article, Thanks a lot for sharing such a kind of informative article. these tips will help me so much!!!

  7. Alexey says

    Can you make an article about new multilingual plugins and their capabilities?
    For example, ConveyThis, Yaglot, MultilingualPress and others

    Developers of new plug-ins usually listen to users better.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      We will keep an eye on new plugins as well as these old ones for which we feel are best :)

      Admin

  8. Alex says

    I’ve used WPML for many projects and I was never really happy. It kills the site loading speed. And nowadays the speed is everything. I heard from a system administrator that the best one is MultilingualPress because it uses the multisite network. But I still didn’t try yet. Just heard. But it makes sense.

  9. mdavid says

    Hi, I’m interested in setting up a multilingual discussion forum where each person would be able to read and contribute to the discussion in their own language. The forum content would automatically translate according to the language preference of the user.
    Is this possible, feasible, how?

    Thanks for any help
    david

  10. Efkan says

    Hi,

    thank you for this helping article. What I am missing though is on how to approach to this topic of translation of my blog as a beginner. It is fine to have an overview like this but the real pros and cons is what I need for a proper decision to choose the one which works for the individual blogging page.

    Like is a plugin fast or slow, does it affect my webpages and how, which is best to use on a small slower server as an example. Which ones can translate menus and taxonomies and which not. Which one has a good User Interface and very important: which ones offer Support Services. From what I know up to now is, best is to choose one plugin and stay with it forever since a change causes some problems or leaves some “trash” behind. etc.

    I would like to go with qTranslateX but I am thinking about getting WPML for my new lightweight blog. Have read that it was very heavy two years ago due to database queries but it is said that it is fixed now and has more speed. I definitely don’t want to use a plugin that slows me down since I am on a budget and not using big and faster server yet.

    Thank you for your very good content on all your pages.
    Cheers,
    EFE

  11. Dan says

    Thanks for the plugin suggestions. I’m using a custom static page as a homepage, I’m wondering which plugin can I use to support this. I installed Polylang and my static front page doesn’t work the way I coded it – the content displays, but all the code pertaining to the template no longer gets loaded. I wonder if there are free plugins which don’t have this issues or if there’s a way around it.

  12. Jacques van Dyk says

    I need to choose a plugin for my web site This is a tourist business based in Namibia in Southern Africa. I would like the site to also display in Chinese. Anyone with suggestions can contact me please. Thank you.

    Kind regards.

    Jacques.

  13. sanjay kumar says

    Great article for word press users, now they can use plugin of language and translation.
    Thanks
    sanjay

  14. loulwa says

    Hello! Do any of these plugins translate the language coming from another plugin? Eg. if I put a plugin for lets say horoscopes in english on my site, will any of these plugins detect the language of the horoscope plugin and translate it?

    thanks in advance!

  15. John Hadfield says

    “The Ultimate WordPress Toolkit” does not tell the reader whether the Tool or Program is to be used for WordPress.com or WordPress.org.

    Could you please tell me which program they are to be used for?

    Thanks

    John Hadfield

  16. Dean says

    I have a client that wants to translate his English site to Spanish and Chinese? Any suggestions? He would like to know the Three best plugins paid or Free?

    I want to know how much time it takes to install and have these up and running? I have read the comments above, but time involved is not mentioned? I have never installed a translation plugin and need to give a fair quote for both parties.

  17. Mark Jordan says

    You may also want to take a look at the GTS Translation plugin.

    This plugin allows you to post-edit translations for increased quality. Supports over 30 languages.

  18. Jolene den Boer says

    Hi there,

    I use Polylang. Works fine.
    One question, though. How do you all cope with the subscribers to your site? I use Jetpack as my subscription program. In the ideal world, I would like to have my English subscribers to only get notified of the English new posts. And the same for the Dutch ones. Howevery, Jetpack can not do that. I checked with their customer support. So now, all my subscribers get notifications of both Dutch and English posts. This is certainly not ideal. I know I would opt out of mailing lists that send me ‘double’ info.
    Who also has the same problem, and is there a solution?

    Please advise.
    Thanks in advance!

  19. Meghna bansal says

    I have use Google Language Translator plugin and it is amazing how it changes languages and thanks to letting me know about more translator plugins.

  20. Katie says

    I used Transposh for a while, and I liked it because its machine generated translations were able to be found in search engines (leading to a boost in international traffic), but I had to deactivate and remove it because it was causing loads of javascript errors.

    Do any of the machine translation plugins mentioned above allow the translated material to be indexed by search engines?

    • Fabrice says

      I have exactly the same problem : Transposh stopped working in some cases (not all the text are translated, and on the post page, it does just no more work) – This was a good solution for me, as Katie says : the translations are indexed by search engines.
      So, does anyone know a similar plugin which will allow to save the translations in the code, in order to be indexed by the search engines ? Katie, could you find a solution ? Thanks !

  21. Alvaro Gois says

    I believe it’s not the first time I make this comment on a similar article: please don’t mix multilingual plugins with automated translation plugins. You’re not contributing to clarify the concept of multilingual content to new users.

    Make two different articles, one for each.

    As to multilingual plugins, I believe MultilingualPress should definitely be mentioned. Your readers would also appreciate to know the differences between those plugins, regarding the way they’re implemented. An alert should be issued to the fact that some of these plugins, like qTranslate did, will leave behind a trail of extra content in your posts and pages in case you decide to use a different plugin.

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Thanks for the feedback. We did try to keep the difference. The title of the article is translation plugins not multilingual plugins. We also kept the multilingual plugins and machine translation plugins apart in the list.

      Admin

  22. Konrad Bauckmeier says

    Choose wisely, because mostly it is very difficult to switch to an other plugin later!

    An other option for a multilingual blog would be a multisite installation. There is a interesting plugin supporting this setup: Multilingual Press (recently the pro version got free, but you have to pay for support if needed)

    This approach is a very clean and would still work after removing the plugin. As disadvantage you need to duplicate all media then, since there is no central media-library. It is not very easy to use in shops too, since it is difficult to synchronize inventory between different sites. Finally, some plugins do not support multisite installation (or ask you to buy a pro version, like SNAP)

  23. Roland Dietz says

    I recommend everybody to forget about the plugins that translate texts with the help of Google or Bing. The results are often terrible and just wrong. The fault lies not in the plugin itself but in the poor results that are delivered by Google or Bing. Whenever I come across a text that has been translated automatically, I go through the process of 1) wondering about the confusing gibberish and b) search for the article in its native language.

  24. Mikael Andersen says

    I guess you have forgotten Genesis Translations by Remkus de Vries.

    It’s a simple plugin that translates perfect to danish for example.

    Though it is made for Genesis Framework, but if one is using this, it is a very good plugin.

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