Set Up a Multilingual Site

You can offer your website in multiple languages. In this guide, we will explain the most popular options to create a bilingual or multilingual WordPress site.

If you already have a website in one language, you can make an exact copy of it in another language. In this scenario, you would create a copy of the site and translate the content manually. Both sites would exist separately with unique domain addresses. The steps are:

1. Create a second website in your account. Higher level plans can use the Copy Site option to make an exact duplicate of the current site. Alternatively, activate the same theme on the new site as you have on the original site.
2. Register a new domain for the new site or set up a subdomain of the main domain. For example, you can have one site at my-english-site.com and the other at mon-site-francais.com, or you could have my-website.com and a subdomain like fr.my-website.com.
3. Set the language of each site to the appropriate language you want the public to see. This sets the language used for elements of your site that you cannot edit directly, such as the comments form and some built-in buttons.
4. Add the translated text to the new site, either by writing it manually or using a tool like Google Translate or ChatGPT.
5. Add a link to each site’s menu that leads visitors to the other site, so visitors can switch to that language:

If you are looking for a more robust set of features for adding multiple languages to your website, consider installing a plugin for this purpose. In this scenario, the multiple language versions of your website can all exist under one domain.

Popular plugins like Polylang, WPML, TranslatePress, and more provide the tools to create translated versions of all of your site’s content, allow seamless switching between languages, and ensure all content is SEO-friendly in each language.