Weglot: a multilingual website in 15 minutes!

Although the Weglot solution can be implemented on any WordPress theme, I can confirm that this plugin is compatible with the Divi theme. Have you noticed the appearance of the two little French-English flags just above 👆 below the title of my articles? A few days ago, I decided to take the plunge and translate my blog AstucesDivi so that it would be available in French AND in English! It only took me 15 minutes watch in hand. Yes, it is possible with Weglot.

In this article, I explain in detail the procedure for obtaining a multilingual site quickly. Here is the program:

• How to get multilingual WordPress with Weglot?
• How much does it cost?
• Weglot and SEO...
• How do I add multilingual flags below the Divi theme's post titles?
• What to do after installing Weglot?
• In conclusion...

 

Announcement: this article contains affiliate links that you will easily recognize. The classic links are in purple and the sponsored links are in pink.

 

How to get multilingual WordPress with Weglot?

The procedure is so easy that it is disconcerting! First of all, you should know that Weglot is a solution that can be implemented in a WordPress but also in any other type of CMS/framework such as ShopifyJimdo, Wix, BigCommerce, Drupal, Symfony, Laravel...

Here, we'll stick to WordPress.

To use Weglot in your WordPress website or blog, you will need to install the Weglot extension and create an account on the official website.

Having done this, here are the few configuration options available to you from the Weglot tab in your site's administration:

 

1 - Main configuration

The first action you will have to perform is to link the plugin with your newly created Weglot account. To do so, you will just have to go to the Weglot tab and enter your API key. You can get it by clicking on the link next to the input field or you can find it in your Weglot account in the Project Settings tab.

Next, you will need to define the original language of your site. On the screenshot above I have chosen French.

Finally, you can choose the destination language(s). In my case, I choseEnglish on the screenshot.

 

2 - Design of the language button

This configuration is optional but this is where you can :

• choose to display your languages as a drop-down list,
• choose to display the flags or only the language name as text,
• define the design of your flags: rectangles or rounds,
• Define whether you want to display the full language name or only the country code (French or FR),
• add CSS if necessary.

 

3 - Position of the language button

In this section, you can define the position of your language buttons. By default, when you activate the Weglot plugin, it automatically displays the language buttons in the bottom right corner, in sticky. But you can decide otherwise:

• you can make the flags appear in the main menu via the Appearance > Menutab
• in the sidebar via the Appearance > Widgetstab
• with a shortcode in order to implement it in the place you want
• or even in the source code of a Divi file.

 

4 - Exclusion of translations

In this section, you can exclude entire pages or parts of pages so that they are not translated. You may want to do this either because you have no interest in it or because you want to save on the number of words (yes, the Weglot licence is based on the number of words to be translated, we'll talk about that a little later in this article...).

In the screenshot above, you can see that I excluded some entire pages by typing the end of my URLs. But I have also excluded all comments using a Divi ID. By entering #comment-wrap Weglot doesn't translate any comments for me, so I save hundreds or even thousands of words...

 

5 - Other options

In this last section, you will find 3 very interesting options such as allowing the user to be redirected in his language according to the configuration of his browser and your available languages or the translation of your AMP pages.

 

How much does it cost?

And yes, let's get to the "money"part... Weglot is indeed "not cheap" and that was really the reason I was hesitating. Here's what you'll have to pay to get your WordPress multiline:

• for a site of less than 2000 words: Weglot is free. Let's just say that I don't know many sites that are less than 2000 words. It could be a solution to translate the homepage for example and then study the impact in terms of traffic.
• for a translation of 10,000 words: 9.90€ht per month or 99€ht per year.
• for a translation of 50.000 words: 19,90€ht per month or 190€ht per year.
• for a translation of 200,000 words: 49€ht per month or 490€ per year.
• for a translation of 1,000,000 words: 199€ht per month or 1990€ per year.

To find out more about the plans proposed by Weglot, I give you go here.

You think it's expensive? A licence WPML or Polylang - which are plugins that can also translate your WordPress sites - will cost you about 100€ht per year (more or less depending on the plan).

However, these solutions are extremely time consuming and tedious to implement - they say that time is money and Weglot will save you a lot of time.

I was able to test all 3 solutions and indeed, Weglot is the lightest, fastest and easiest...

Imagine how long it can take to translate a 50-page website, or worse, how much it would cost to outsource the translation to freelancers or specialist companies?

The strength of Weglot compared to other solutions is that you don't have to spend hours translating your content! No, Weglot takes care of that and it must be said that the translation is quite good. There are not many false notes, a few typos, of course, but you can correct them.

However, be careful, each added language doubles your translation quota. For example, on AstucesDivi, I currently only have one thirty or so articles published. So I chose the 50,000 wordplan...

Ouch, ouch, ouch! It is already reached, so I will have to upgrade my plan soon. If I wanted to add two more languages in addition to English, I would have already reached 150,000 translated words. So you can see that it can go very, very fast!

 

Weglot and SEO...

This is another question you may have. Given that natural referencing is important for a website, you may wonder if search engines will take into account the languages you add with Weglot. The answer is YES, Weglot is compatible with Google's multilingualism guidelines.

Languages are added to the URL via a sub-folder. For example, https://astucesdivi.com/ is in French - https://astucesdivi.com/in/ is in English.

Everything is well translated like the Meta Title or Meta Description tag that you enter in Yoast for example and which is used to appear in the search results.

By default, your URLs will remain in the original language of your site but will have a prefix such as https://mon-site.com/in/the-title-of-my-article-in-its-original-language/. If you wish to translate them, there is an insert at the bottom of your articles for this purpose. You can manually modify the URL of your translated pages.

Read this article to better understand how Weglot handles your SEO.

 

How do I add multilingual flags below the Divi theme's post titles?

For this you will need a child theme for Divi. Once you have it, it's very easy to do:

1. Copy the file single.php from the Divi theme (the parent theme).
2. Edit this file using a text editor such as SublimText par exemple puis ajoutez le code <strong><div id= »weglot_here »></div></strong> juste en dessous du <strong>titre entouré d’une balise H1</strong> comme vous pouvez le voir <strong>à la ligne 37 de la capture d’écran</strong> ci-dessous :
3. Save and insert this copy in the child theme's folder (in the root). It will be taken into account instead of the single.php of the parent theme.
4. Upload your child theme to the server and activate it instead of the Divi theme. If your child theme is already present and active, just add the single.php file to its root.
5. Now your articles have the Weglot flags just below their title.

 

Find out what you can do with the Divi theme

 

What to do after installing Weglot?

All the above actions really took me 15 minutes: creation of the Weglot account + extension settings + modification of my single.php

However, this may not be enough. Here is what you could do after installing Weglot:

 

1 - Visit all the pages to be translated

This action allows you to automate the translation and activate them. You will therefore have to review your entire site, just as a web surfer might do. You don't have to do anything else to activate the translations.

 

2 - Correcting typos

Once your site has been translated, you can go to your Weglot account and make corrections if you find that some of the translations are not up to your expectations. The handling is quite simple, you will see.

 

3 - Activate the monitoring of your statistics

Not all Weglot users think about it, but it is important to perform some actions within your Google Analytics account to be able to track the URLs visited in your translated languages. Here is the procedure:

• Go to your Google Analytics account (you must have already created an account to link your website and track its statistics),
• Go to the tab called "Administration" at the bottom left,
• Select your property if you have several,
• Go to View > "+Create View
• Name your view, e.g. "English statistics", and set the time zone,
• Click on "create a view".
• Then, still in "view", go to the Filter tab and click on "add a filter".
• Name your filter, for example "English version",
• Filter type = "predefined filter" then choose :
• "Include only
• "Traffic to subdirectories
• "Containing
• Subdirectory: "/en/" (for English for example)
• End with "save".

Now you can track the traffic from people visiting your foreign language URLs. You may wonder why you should do this when your statistics already show you the share of traffic from foreign countries?

It is important to differentiate between these two since some Internet users based in the USA or in England for example are not necessarily English-speaking, they may simply be French-speaking and live abroad. This will not give you the real traffic of your site in another language. By creating a new view with a filter in Google Analytics, you will be able to separate the French-speaking traffic from the English-speaking traffic (or other languages used).

 

4 - Provide images for each language version

Even if Weglot is a magic solution, this plugin will not translate the images for you. It will translate the captions but not the content of the images, of course...

If you're used to promoting your blog posts on social media, and especially on Pinterest, you should certainly consider offering multiple versions of your images for pinning. A Pinterest strategy will certainly be beneficial in making your articles available in your other languages. Of course, this will not take 15 minutes... and it is a lot of work that you will have to do.

 

In conclusion...

Considering offering a website or blog in several languages is not a decision to be taken lightly. As you can see, it will cost you money and/or time. For my part, I've given it a lot of thought and I'm waiting to see the benefits in terms of traffic, in the medium and long term, that my translated pages will bring me...