Two-language website setup

  • In 2015 I’ve started my blog (website) using WordPress. Say the address is example.com. It is in my native language.
    At the same time, not knowing any better, I had decided to make all the info available in English as well. So I set up a completely separate WordPress install at say english.example.com.

    My website provides niche information. It ranks fine for the relevant content in search engines. Lately, I’ve learned a bit about hreflang tags, marking and linking different language versions of the same content etc.

    Now, to do that, it seems plugins are a quick and relatively easy way. However, most require either making the whole thing “multisite”, or coppying all the data from english.example.com to example.com, as a “translation”.

    I find the current set up to be very stable, “sturdy” and to work fine. Visitors googling in my native get example.com results, while English querries return english.example.com pages.

    In addition to that, each website has a link to the alternate language version home page (but no page-level links). And that works fine too as well.

    The question is – should I still make the hreflang links between the two sites? Is there a way to do it without going multisite, or coppying all the content from one site, placing it all in one place?

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  • Have you checked out WPML? As far as I am aware it allows you to have different installs of WordPress as you have detailed.

    Thread Starter Relja

    (@relja)

    Thanks for the reply. Have looked into the plugin. Apparently, there are people complaining it slows the website performance down. From what i could tell, all the multilanguage plugins have downsides, even the “premium” ones.

    My website is not very large – about 10 pages and 130 posts (per language version). But it’s growing about 1 post per week.

    Might just leave it as it is, without any multilang support, apart from a choice in the top-right corner that takes you to the alt. language website version. Google searches in each language show the relevant language page version, so it seems to have figured it out without the hreflang. With good page rankings as well – so probably no double content penalties (languages differ vastly, only images are the same).

    I’m not selling anything so this seems like too much bother with questionable benefits to the visitors and the google as well.

    Considering adding hreflang codes manually on home pages, and a few top-landing pages perhaps, but not sure how exactly to do it or if it has any downsides (like plugins do, in terms of slower website, problems when/if uninstalling them etc.).

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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