WordPress is a great content management system- with one fault. It can support only one language at a time. This is a problem for companies that want to expand their reach by hosting a website with content in several target languages. There’s good news, though. This problem has a solution – Polylang WordPress translation. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you won’t know how it works or how to get it on your website. No worries. That’s what we’re here for.
We’ll show you how you can create a multilingual WordPress site to give your business the global presence it deserves. Before diving into that, you should know the upsides of using Polylang to translate your website content.
The Advantages of Polylang WordPress Translation
- Wide range of languages: The free version of this plugin will give you access to over 90 languages, while the premium version has unlimited languages. It doesn’t get more impressive than that. The best part is that users can also add custom languages.
- Easy to use: It doesn’t matter if this is your first time using this plugin or not; navigating your way around it is pretty simple. Similarly, Polylang makes it very easy to translate your website content.
- Polylang performs well: It is compatible with several cache plugins, doesn’t require much storage, and does not interfere with or slow down the performance of your website.
- It’s SEO-friendly: Polylang works well with many SEO plugins, which makes it ideal for your website translation needs.
How to Use Polylang?
The process that describes creating a multilingual WordPress site with Polylang is outlined below:
Step 1: Install And Activate Polylang
- Visit your WordPress admin panel and log in.
- Go to the “Plugins” section and select “Add New.”
- Choose “Polylang” from the options that will display and tap on “Install Now.”
- After the plugin is installed, hit the “Activate” prompt. This should take you to the installation wizard. If it doesn’t, tap the “Run the Setup Wizard” button from the header notifications.
Step 2: Polylang Basic Configuration
- Launch the plugin after activation and go to “Languages.” Then, add the relevant target language(s). If you’re adding multiple languages, you’ll need to tap “Add New Language” after selecting a new language. The interface also has a bin icon where you can delete the target languages you don’t want.
- Go to settings for media translation and allow Polylang to translate media content. Click “Continue”.
- Go to the “content” and select a default language. Tap on “continue” and go back to the dashboard.
- When you click on the icon, it will launch the WordPress editor and help you edit the content into your desired target language. Then save it.
Step 4: Translating Menu Items
Menu items consist of categories, taxonomies, and tags.
- Go to the menu item that you want, whether it’s a category, tag, or taxonomy.
- Then click on the edit icon beside the menu item you want to translate.
- This will display the translation field where you will tap on the “+” button on the menu item.
- This will open up a new page for the menu item where you get to fill in the fields and give a name for each target language you’re adding.
- Click “Add New” to translate the menu item(s) successfully.
Conclusion
Polylang WordPress translation is one of the most affordable and reliable solutions for creating a multilingual WordPress site. The process outlined in the steps above is very straightforward, so you should have no problem following it. To recap, you need to install and activate the plugin, then configure it to get it ready for translation. After its setup, you can then use it to translate posts or pages and menu items. You can even use it to translate widgets, strings, and so many more.