WordPress is used by millions of non-English websites around the world. You can use WordPress to create a website in any language that you want.
However, WordPress does not come with the built-in capability to create a multilingual websites. Luckily, there are some powerful WordPress translation plugins that allow you to easily add multilingual content to your site.
In this article, we will show you the best WordPress translation plugins that you can use to create multilingual websites. We will take a look at their features, pros and cons, to help you pick the best option for your website.
Choosing a Translation Plugin to Create Multilingual WordPress Websites
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 there are many translation plugins available for WordPress, they can be characterized in two main categories.
The 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 plugins are the ones that use online translation services to translate your content. 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 website including content, theme, plugins, and more.
Following are our top picks for the best WordPress multilingual plugins to easily translate your entire website.
1. 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, theme, 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. These users will be able to translate content without access to the admin area.
If manual translations sound like a lot of work, then you can also 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 €79 for personal license.
2. WPML
WPML is one of the most popular WordPress multilingual plugin. It comes with a powerful translation management system that allows you to translate content, themes, plugins, and more.
WPML comes in 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 some other features.
It comes with 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: $29 for Multilingual Blog version and $79 for Multilingual CMS.
3. 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 for that.
It allows you to setup SEO friendly URLs for each language, and it 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 Pro version for €99 with a single site license.
4. Weglot
Weglot is a cloud-based website translation platform. It works with WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more.
During the setup, you will need to enter Weglot API to connect your WordPress site to their platform. 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, 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 which come with a fixed yearly license.
Pricing: Starting from €8.25 / month for 1 language and 10,000 Words. Their popular PRO plan supports unlimited languages and 200,000 words for €41 per month.
5. MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress takes a slightly different approach to create 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 $199 / year for a single multisite license.
Best WordPress Translation Plugins
These plugins allow you to translate your website using automated translation services or by manually providing translations for some parts of your website.
6. 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 easily translate your web pages, or you can automatically translate content based on user’s browser language.
The plugin offers a paid version as well which allows you to choose SEO friendly URLs and let search engines index your translated content (more on this later in the article).
7. Transposh WordPress Translation
Transposh combines automated machine translations with manual human translations. You can also allow your website visitors to contribute translations with an easy to use in-context interface.
The plugin allows you to hire professional translation services to submit translations. Transposh’s automated translation feature supports Google, Bing, Yandex, and Apertium translation services.
8. Google Website Translator
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 detects it via their browser settings.
9. Loco Translate
Loco Translate is slightly different than other translation plugins in the list. It basically allows you to translate WordPress themes and plugins.
If your WordPress theme or plugin is translation-ready, then you can use Loco Translate to translate it inside the WordPress dashboard. It uses a simple user interface similar to popular translation 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.
Our Pick of the Best WordPress Multilingual 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 with no experience of 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 Translate WordPress with Gtranslate plugin. It is easy to use and even the free version is quite good for automtic 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. Allowing search engines to index this low-quality content is a bad idea. Google can identify such content and will consider it as spam which would damage your website’s search rankings.
However for manual site translations, yes you should definitely 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 practical tips on how to increase your website traffic.
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Out of the 9 plugins, I have tried Weglot and it worked good for us. Will give other plugins also a try.
Glad our recommendation worked for you and hope the other options are helpful as well
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
Thank you for your recommendation for us to consider when updating the article or for new articles.
Great article, Thanks a lot for sharing such a kind of informative article. these tips will help me so much!!!
You’re welcome, glad our article could help
Good article
Thank you
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.
We will keep an eye on new plugins as well as these old ones for which we feel are best
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.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with the plugins
What about Neuronto Plugin? It’s a innovative solution that uses AI.
We have not tested it but we’ll certainly take a look
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
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
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.
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.
Great article for word press users, now they can use plugin of language and translation.
Thanks
sanjay
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!
“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
Hey John,
It is for self hosted WordPress.org sites.
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.
Great article for WordPress users, now they can use Plugin of Language Translation.
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.
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!
We will recommend you to use MailChimp or Aweber instead. You will need to create different lists that your users can subscribe to. You can either add dynamic signup forms for each language or you can add a signup form with checkboxes for different lists. Take a look at how we do it to create daily and weekly email newsletter.
Probably not working with comments since I’m getting doubled notifications…
Thanks for the advise! I will look into it.
Pfff, ever so complicated. So many features! I just want to notify my subscribers of new posts, in their prefered language only, that’s it. Any suggestions?
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.
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?
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 !
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.
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.
Do not use qtranslate people its never updated and can seriously screw up your website!!
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)
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.
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.