Making a website accessible to people all over the world by adding multiple languages is vital if you’re running events for the global WordPress community, like here at WordFest Live.
There are an estimated 64 million websites currently using WordPress.
That means the community is built from literally hundreds of thousands of people from every corner of the world. These WordPressers are known for their interest in growing, developing, and building skills from other users of the website building platform.
And — reasonably so — many want to read information in their native language, especially when it comes to learning.
So in this post, we’ll take a look at why we decided to translate the WordFest Live website with WordPress translation plugin, Weglot.
Why We Added Languages to our WordPress Website
#1 Reach new audiences
Translating the WordFest Live website was important for a few reasons. Number one for us reaching a wider audience by making our content more accessible.
Did you know that just 25% of the internet is made up of English speakers? Producing content only in English would alienate a huge part of the audience that wants to participate in our festival of WordPress.
So, we chose to add Chinese, Hindi, French and Spanish to our English website to cover multiple regions of WordPress users.
#2 SEO
Another important consideration for translating our website was to improve our international SEO.
Adding 4 languages means receiving organic traffic from other countries. With 50% of queries made on Google in languages other than English, that has the potential to be a lot of traffic.
This helps the visibility of our event within the WordPress community and allows us to reach more people, spreading the word both in terms of this event and what we do year round through Big Orange Heart.
#3 Personalization
Third, we liked the personalization that selecting from multiple languages provides. We want our website visitors to feel comfortable and at home on our site.
Allowing them to choose from a selection of languages does exactly that.
We also made sure our language switcher was displayed in the original language name. That way users can quickly identify the options and select their preferred language.
How to Add Languages with Weglot
Adding multiple languages with Weglot was an obvious choice. In just a few minutes, we were able to add 4 new languages and go live instantly.
Using the Weglot plugin meant we avoided manual string-by-string translation and quickly benefited from a first layer of machine translation given by Weglot. And you can of course manually edit your translations as needed.
Follow the tutorial from Weglot to translate your WordPress website and sign up for their 10-day free trial.
Big Orange Heart