Language is ubiquitous on the internet (except possibly cat videos) and WordPress powers around 40% of all websites. So it shouldn’t surprise you, WordPress has language settings with effects on both the front and back end of your website. Using these settings, you can influence how your website is parsed by both your visitors and staff (administrators, editors, and other contributors).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to use WordPress language settings in the best possible way. Whether you want to cater to a specific audience or the needs of your employees or contributors, you’ll find everything you need in this article. Here’s what we’ll talk about:
Language settings are built-in features of WordPress. they let you Change the language of the WordPress interface To any of the languages supported by WordPress. They won’t translate your content though: You need either a human translator or a translation plugin for that. To change the language setting for your entire website, go to its general settings by selecting . Settings/General From your WordPress dashboard.
there you will find Site Language Drop down menu. The menu is also marked with a language icon so you know where it is in case you accidentally change your site’s language to a language you don’t understand. Default setting English (United States).
Clicking on the menu will reveal dozens of supported languages. Installed languages will be at the top, and those that require installation will be at the bottom. Clicking on any of them will automatically install the required files and change your language settings.
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes For your selection to take effect
This will change not only your dashboard settings but also some of your frontend features.
As for the front end, WordPress will try to change the language there as well, but the extent of its success will depend on whether the theme and plugins you use have multilingual support. Since many indie developers produce software for WordPress, your results may vary. For example, a calendar plugin you use might not be translated into a language you want to use. In this case, your website may not be displayed properly.
In our case, after switching to French, our articles remained, of course, in their original language, but you can see that the dates are in French.
But suppose you have a regular contributor or even a major employee who doesn’t speak the language the site is intended to display? After all, a variety of technical and admin roles can be performed by people unrelated to the main body of your website’s content. You can resolve this by owning the user in question. change their individual settings.
To do this, they need to sign in and then go to their profile. located at: user profile in WordPress dashboards.
Once there, they should have no trouble finding it. Slice Menu. Even if they do not understand the language of the website, it is very clearly marked with the language icon. Clicking the drop-down menu will reveal the installed languages. Once a language is selected, scroll to the bottom of the page and Update Profile.
Your participant will be able to choose from all installed languages. You can install any supported language by selecting it from the general settings panel as described above. If your participant does not have permission to access the settings panel, a user with admin or super admin credentials can help.
Note that this will only change the dashboard for that particular user, without affecting the website for other users or visitors.
So far, we’ve covered the language settings for the entire website and for a single user. But what if you cater to visitors who speak a variety of languages? In short, if you want create a multilingual website?
The simplest way to do this is to manually create multiple versions of your website from scratch and then have your visitors split into the versions they choose. But while this is the simplest way, it is far from the easiest. As you probably expect, you can use a plugin to do most of the work for you.
Of course, saving that much time will set you back a bit: our preferred solution is: Weglota premium WordPress plugin.
Weglot works by detecting all language content Translates your website including the content of the plugin and using it machine translators. It then installs a language switcher so that your visitors can choose their preferred language as soon as they land on your website. The best of them all? It takes minutes to set up and does everything automatically.
We won’t go into the details of Weglot’s features now – we’ve covered Weglot in detail in another article. We will use this space to draw your attention to some features that we think are worth highlighting.
First of all, while you can get automatic machine translation right from the start, you can still do it. refine results to remove kinks, which is a normal occurrence even when auto translator is not used. The plugin is also SEO optimizedis added automatically hreflang tags and creating separate URLs for each page. Finally, you can also use Weglot for: switch images between different language versions of your website appeal to different audiences with relative ease.
That’s the gist of it, though, we’ve only scratched the surface of Weglot here. We stand behind our recommendation and highly recommend you give it a try.
As a result
As you can see, WordPress’ language settings are not a big mistake. If you are trying to create a multilingual website there is either software license fees or a lot of painstaking work, but it will always be a challenge. Switching between WordPress supported languages, on the other hand, requires just a few clicks on WordPress’ built-in features, and your website and dashboard will be set to your desired language, provided it’s one of the dozens of supported languages and dialects. .
Support our work ❤️
If you enjoyed this article, consider leaving a tip to help us keep publishing great content.
