You should want your WordPress website to reach the largest scope of users possible. This can be made possible by ensuring that your website is multilingual, as users from around the world can read the content on your site which can lead to more leads and conversions.

Multi-language WordPress sites allow you to cater to diverse demographics, improving user experience and engagement, so it’s no wonder why it’s become very popular for businesses to have.

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Expat businesses will especially benefit from having a multilingual WordPress site, as they are more likely to attract users from a variety of different countries.

To create a multilingual website, you’ll need to translate the content on your pages into multiple different languages. This includes posts, menus and plugins, as these will enhance user experience and accessibility. Doing this is a great way of improving trust and credibility for your expat business.

This guide will teach you how to build a multilingual WordPress website for your expat business and go in-depth about the benefits it can bring to your brand. Continue reading to find out more.

Benefits of Multilingual Websites

Before we delve into how to create multilingual websites on WordPress, it’s important that you understand the benefits that it can bring to your expat business. Some of these include:

  • Reach new audiences in more countries
  • Build brand awareness
  • Increase sales by increasing conversion and ROI
  • Improve SEO presence in a variety of countries
  • Enhances targeting for niche expat interests; e.g. British Citizenship applications
  • Establishes a competitive edge
  • Customer centrism
  • Cost-efficient marketing

In a choice between similar products, 75% of consumers will select options where information is available in their language so if your website is available in multiple languages, there is a higher chance of a purchase being completed.

How to Build a Multilingual WordPress Website

Choose the Right Plugin

For your multilingual WordPress website to work effectively, you need to select a suitable plugin that will enhance its functionality. The most popular option for this is WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML). This is a comprehensive plugin that allows you to translate posts and pages, so it can support various languages to improve the user-friendliness of the website. There is another plugin called TranslatePress that gives you the option to integrate Google Translate onto your website for automatic translations.

Plan the Language Structure

The way the language is structured on the website matters greatly. You can either go for the subdomain or subdirectory approach. If you choose the subdomain structure, you will have a separate subdomain for each language, for example es.example.com will be for the Spanish variation of your website. However, the subdirectory version of this would be example.com/es/. Subdirectory seems to be the better option for SEO and subdomains for clearer separation.

Effectively Translate Content

Ensuring that all of the translations on your website are accurate are essential in making your brand the most authentic and trustworthy it can be. Expat businesses will have an advantage with this, as they are more likely to already speak and understand other languages making for easy translation. If not, professional translators can be hired for improved accuracy and cultural relevance. You need to ensure that you avoid machine translation for the most part, as a lot of them are inaccurate.

Optimise for SEO

Maximising the visibility of each of your translated websites can be achieved through SEO. There’s several SEO techniques that you can use to achieve the best results when it comes to search engine results pages (SERPs). Keyword research allows you to target each language when optimising your content, so you can find the most relevant words that will be searched by users coming to your website. Having SEO-friendly URLs and language tags will also be beneficial for your multilingual WordPress website.

Improve User Experience

You can get a higher engagement and conversion rate on your multilingual WordPress website by improving the user experience on each of your pages. Adding an automated language switcher can allow users to quickly choose their preferred language and quickly navigate the website without having to go to a completely new page. Expat businesses can also tailor their content to reflect local culture that are relevant to specific websites, as this will best cater to each type of audience. Having unique promotions or events is a great way to do this.

Conduct Tests

Once you have everything in place, you need to make sure that’s all running accordingly before you put it live as you want the user’s experience to be as smooth as possible. You can conduct user tests in all of the countries you have languages for to identify any potential issues with the multilingual sites. They can point out if anything is wrong with navigation or content. Tracking website performance on analytic tools can help you with adjusting your strategy based on each country’s user engagement.