Guide to Developing and Designing a Multilingual Website

Business having websites often look forward to capture a wider audience base and for that targeting varied markets with language skills are definitely worthy. And for this, business owners are focusing more on creating multilingual sites, which means a site having content in varied languages that allows you to communicate effectively with the audience. Offering a multilingual site is a great means to make it more user friendly and let your audience know that you care for their needs.

But at the same time, developing a multi-language website is often a big undertaking as you need some tools that will not only help to create a good looking site, but also translate every element that includes text to images into various languages.

What You Need to Consider to Create a Multi-Language Website:

Pick the Best Platform for Your Website:

Language plays a great role in multilingual website development and before you can translate your content into various new languages, you need to work on the website’s original language. So, there are mainly two approaches to create a website on the modern web:

• Choose to use a self-hosted content management system like Drupal or WordPress
• Use a hosted website builder like Wix, Shopify, Squarespace.

Though it is possible to start multilingual web development with website builders, but it is not what they are built for.  So if you are going to create a multi-language site, then using a self-hosted CMS is going to make it easier to optimize the experience for both the front end and back end.

Implement Multilingual SEO Features to Rank Your Site:

Another big advantage of creating a multilingual website development is to be able to connect with the new audiences in top search engines like Google and etc. But if you want to attain the best benefit, then it is important to emphasis on multilingual search engine optimization. SEO involves trying to rank your website higher in Google and then applying the same concept, but to different languages. you can easily implement some of the comprehensive translations that includes not just the text but also the URL slugs and SEO metadata. The Multilingual XML sitemap helps Google to find your content in each language and the optimized URL structure helps to become more effective.

 

Also Read: Tips to Create Multilingual Websites in SharePoint

 

Pay Close Attention to the Page Load Times:

Make sure that your website loads very quickly and it is important from user experience to engagement and SEO and also your website’s conversion rates. This is important for both single and multi-language sites development, but the stakes are more harmful for the multilingual sites as some solutions can easily slow down the site by adding extra and unnecessary files, which may drop the loading speed of the site.

Integrate a User Friendly Language Switcher:

In order to gain the best benefits from your Multilanguage websites, your visitors should be aware that they exist. One best means to make your language switcher accessible is to use a floating language switcher, which can be present in the bottom corner of the site. You can also add the language switcher to the navigation menu or even the sidebar. You can display the language in its local format and don’t rely on language flags alone as it can be very confusing.

Pay Attention to Design and Layouts:

While you create the initial design of your site, it is important to focus on making every element pixel perfect.  However, when you translate your web content into other languages, the spacing can become an issue as all language may not take the same amount of space. So, adjust the layout issues and ensure a perfect design in all the languages as it will offer a consistent view in real time.

 

Also Read: Why a Multilingual Website Outsourcing Agency is Preferred Over Machine Translation