Multilingual Website

Nowadays the Internet brings people from different parts of the world closer like never before. A significant benefit is that you can connect with people all around the globe and enter markets in different countries easier. A major step to globalize your business is to have a multilingual website. In other words to serve your content translated and adjusted for the market that you want to enter.

Having your website into English already makes your content internationally accessible, because a lot of people understand the language. However, if you want to focus on specific countries, look more reliable there and increase your efficiency, it is good to have a website version translated into the local language.

You can either translate your entire website or only part of it that you want to display into another language. A good practice is to make sure that every page which has an equivalent into a different language is linked to the original one. This is to avoid a negative UX effect by redirecting to the home page when someone switches the language.

Another element that has to be considered is the language switcher. It should be placed in a position where people can find it easily. This way everyone who goes to a certain language version of your website can quickly switch to the language he/she is comfortable with, instead of leaving your website.

Building a globalized website increases the chance of more visitors and conversions.

Having a localized website makes you more competitive in local markets.

Providing different language versions can make you look more reliable.

Domain – Consider the domain structure for different language versions. One option is to use a subfolder – website.com/en. Another is to use a subdomain – en.website.com. The best option is to register a country code domain for each language. Such as .es, .co.uk, .ru, etc. Using a subfolder or subdomain is a bit cheaper, but not as flexible as separate country code domains. Moreover, separate domains make you look more trustworthy.

URL Slugs – Along with the domain, also pay attention to the URL slugs. A good practice is to use localized slugs for each page. Such as website.com/contact in English, or website.es/contacto in Spanish. If the language uses a non-Latin alphabet transliterate the slug – website.ru/kontakt in Russian.

CDN – To have a good UX all around the world your website should load quickly from everywhere. To achieve this you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a service provider that has servers in different locations across the world and when someone opens your website from a certain point the CDN sends this person a cached version from the closest server they have.

Language Markup in HTML – To help the search engines detect the website language you should declare it in your HTML code.

Geolocation – This is a technique to detect the IP location or language preferences of visitors when they open your website and automatically redirect them to a language version based on this.