Website internationalization

Join thousands of brands using Weglot for website internationalization

What is website internationalization?

The Internet means we’re more connected than ever. People can purchase products or services from anywhere in the world and when you’re thinking about entering new markets from a business perspective, you’ll likely have come across the term internationalization.

Website internationalization or for those more familiar with the term i18n, is the process of ensuring your website is set up to handle different languages and your overall website architecture is able to accommodate these multiple languages.

You need to navigate the process of translating, storing and ultimately publishing the multilingual content of your website. Your CMS is the focus of your website internationalization project and i18n is the way of enabling you to then easily localize your product and the content of your website.

What does internationalization involve?

Technology

Making it possible for you to display the content of your website in different languages and locals is the first step and therefore creating a website architecture that doesn’t involve duplicate pages or websites
Your localized website content should live under the same URL within language specific subdirectories or subdomains to avoid duplicate content penalties from Google
Setting up hreflang tags within your source code to help Google determine both the language of the page and which region it is intended for
Setting up language redirection to display the right language for your website visitor

Design

Adapting your website architecture to allow for the different word length of the languages you’ll be adding
Being able to display, hide or adapt part of the website depending on the language
Designing for right to left languages

Weglot and internationalization

Weglot is your full solution for website internationalization.

Once installed on your website, no matter where you are in the internationalization process, Weglot sets up your website to accommodate multiple languages.

It means there’s no need to panic if you haven’t designed your website for internationalization from day 1.

Displaying your content

With Weglot, you’ll never have to create duplicate pages or websites again because translated pages are automatically displayed under language-specific subdirectories or subdomains.

Visitors can also be redirected to the correct language website depending on their web browser language if you enable user redirection.

Website design

Use Weglot’s Visual Editor to see the languages on your website before you go live so you can adapt your copy and adjust your overall website design.

And, get full design control over your language switcher with simple design editing options directly within the Weglot dashboard.

Multilingual SEO

Weglot follows Google’s best practices for multilingual SEO. This includes your translations being displayed in your source code, and automatically added hreflang tags to ensure your content will be found by your new markets.

Website localization

Weglot takes care of the whole website translation process. Website localization, automatic content detection, full control over your translation quality and an automated workflow that continuously syncs with your site as you add more content to your website over time.

As a designer, it’s important to know how the copy looks on the page, especially when it comes to translating texts that suddenly get shorter or longer depending on the language. With Weglot’s visual editor, I could see straight away which part of the copy needed to be adapted or which part of the design could be improved to work with the longer copy.