In an increasingly multilingual world, a WordPress translation plugin helps you connect with visitors in their native languages.
This can have some real positive effects on your site. With the right WordPress translation plugin, it’s surprisingly simple to start offering your WordPress site in different languages.
In this post, you’ll learn exactly how to get started with WordPress translation using a WordPress multilingual plugin, as well as the two big ways in which going multilingual can help your website grow and succeed.
WordPress Add Language: Why It’s Important (Two Benefits)
A WordPress translation plugin can help you connect better with your existing visitors, as well as reach more visitors in the first place by expanding your visibility in search engines like Google.
1. Most People Want to Browse in Their Native Language
If you have a multilingual audience – which most websites do – it’s not surprising that many in that audience want to browse your site in their native language.
According to a 2011 Eurobarometer/European Commission release, 90% of EU internet users prefer to access websites in their own language, and 44% feel they miss interesting information when it isn’t available in a language they understand. More recent studies continue to show strong preferences for local-language content; for example, CSA Research (2020) found that 76% prefer buying with information in their language and 40% say they will never buy from websites in other languages. Some newer EU research also reports lower preference levels in certain contexts (e.g., a study citing 59% of users preferring content in their most preferred language), but the overall takeaway remains: language choice matters.
When you consider that English represents only a portion of the global audience, the opportunity becomes clear. Estimates often show English accounting for roughly a quarter of internet users by language, while English is used by about half of websites’ content. This gap is why multilingual content can unlock new audiences.
Even if you geographically narrow things down further than “every person on the Internet“, there’s still a good chance you have a multilingual audience. For example, in California, approximately 44.1% of people age 5+ speak a language other than English at home (2019–2023). For the USA as a whole, 78.3% speak only English at home (2018–2022), which implies about 21.7% use another language at home.
To get an estimate for the languages spoken by your website’s audience, use Google Analytics 4. In GA4, go to Reports → User attributes → Demographic details, then switch the primary dimension to Language. You can also build an Exploration and add the language or languageCode dimension to analyze behavior and conversions by user language.
If you find that you have a multilingual audience, a WordPress translation plugin is a great way to improve your site’s user experience by creating a multilingual site to match.
2. You Can Expand Your Visibility in Google
Beyond your existing visitors, a WordPress translation plugin can also help you implement a marketing strategy known as multilingual SEO or Search Engine Optimization.
Regular SEO is all about ranking your content at the top of Google’s search results. Then, multilingual SEO expands on that by helping you rank the same ideas in new languages.
See, people around the world are searching Google for the same ideas – just in different languages.
While an English speaker might find the Popup Maker website by searching for “WordPress popup plugin”, there are also people searching for the same idea in Spanish – “Complemento emergente de WordPress”.
People searching for both phrases want the same thing (as do those searching in different languages), and a WordPress multilingual plugin helps you reach all of those people.
Looking for more ways to improve SEO? Be sure to check out our WordPress SEO Mistakes That Can Wreck Your Conversion Rates article!
WordPress Add Language Tutorial: Step-by-Step
Now that you know why it’s important to create a multilingual WordPress site, let’s dig into how you can do it.
For this example, we’ll show you how to create a multilingual popup with Popup Maker, but you can apply these techniques to the rest of your site as well.
1. Create Your Popup with Popup Maker
To get started, you can install and activate the free Popup Maker plugin from WordPress.org.
Then, head to Popup Maker → Add Popup to create your first popup. From there, add a title and use the visual editor box to add your popup’s content:
Then, you can scroll down to the Popup Settings box to configure where and when your popup should display.
For example, you could use a Time Delay trigger to display your popup after a certain length of time:
You can also use the Targeting rules to control which pages the popup appears on, as well as which devices will see the popup.
Once you’re finished, go ahead and Publish your popup. If you go to a page where the popup is targeted, you should see it in action:
If you want to add more functionality to your popup, you can check out the huge array of premium extensions.
For example, the Advanced Theme Builder extension gives you more control over creating and editing your popup themes:
Or, the Advanced Targeting Conditions extension and Exit Intent Popups extension give you access to some neat new ways to trigger and target your popups.
Once you’re happy with everything about your popup’s monolingual functionality, let’s take the next step and add a new language.
2. Install the Weglot Plugin and Choose Your Languages
To create a multilingual WordPress site, you can use the Weglot WordPress add language plugin. This plugin works with any WordPress theme, as well as all WordPress plugins, including Popup Maker.
To get started, install and activate the free Weglot plugin from WordPress.org. Then, go to the Weglot registration page and create your Weglot account.
Weglot offers a 14-day free trial. After that, there’s a free plan for very small sites (currently up to 2,000 translated words and 1 translated language). If you exceed the free plan’s word limit, translations stop displaying until you reduce usage or upgrade to a paid plan.
Once you’ve done that, take the API key that Weglot provides you in your Weglot account dashboard and add it to the Weglot plugin’s settings in your WordPress dashboard.
In that same settings area, you’ll also want to choose your language settings:
- Original language – this is the default WordPress language used by your site.
- Destination languages – this is the new language that you want to offer your site in. For example, select “German” to add German as a site language. Or, select Spanish. You get the idea!
3. Manually Refine Weglot’s Automatic Translations
As soon as you click Save Changes, the Weglot WordPress add language plugin uses automatic translations powered by machine translation to translate your entire site…including your popup! Auto-translation is a great starting point, but for SEO and user experience you should review and improve important pages so each language version reads naturally and offers genuine value.
So as soon as you activate Weglot, your popup (and the rest of your site) will already be multilingual:
If you’d like to refine those translations manually, you can use the Weglot cloud dashboard.
Here, you’ll have two ways to edit your translations.
If you want to edit your popup’s translations, you can use the side-by-side Translations list. PO/MO language files are typically used for translating WordPress interface strings in themes and plugins, whereas page and post content is handled directly through your multilingual tool’s editor (such as Weglot’s dashboard), so there are no language files to upload.
For some popups, you can also use the Visual Editor, which shows you a live, interactive version of your site. To edit any text, you just hover over it and click the green pencil icon.
Note – a modal popup will obscure the pencil icon from Weglot, so you’ll want to at least temporarily disable your popup’s overlay in the Popup Maker settings if you want to use the Visual Editor.
And that’s all there is to it! You can use the same translation editing techniques to manage other content on your site, as well.
4. Use Popup Maker to Further Localize Your Site
Beyond just plain translating your popup content, there’s also another neat way that you can integrate Popup Maker with a WordPress add language plugin like Weglot.
If you’ve ever browsed a website from a location other than that site’s default language location, you’ve probably encountered some type of popup telling you about different localized versions of that site.
For example, if you visit Bose’s USA website from outside the USA, Bose will prompt you to visit their local website for your region:
The Weglot WordPress add language plugin automatically adds a front-end language switcher that visitors can use, but Popup Maker lets you take things further and implement this type of language redirect popup.
To set up this functionality, you could create one popup that lists all the localized versions of your site:
That would prompt visitors to choose their language when they first visit your site. You can also use Popup Maker’s cookies to ensure visitors don’t see the popup on each visit:
Or, you could also work with the Popup Maker team to connect to a geotargeting service and create separate geotargeted popups for each language that you offer.
Make WordPress Multilingual Today!
With a WordPress translation plugin, you can start offering your WordPress site in different languages, which helps you provide a better browsing experience for your existing visitors and reach new visitors in search engines like Google.
For an easy way to get started with WordPress translation that’s compatible with Popup Maker and all other WordPress plugins and themes, you can use the Weglot WordPress add language plugin at WordPress.org.
Then, to further localize your site and make sure your visitors know they can browse in different languages, you can use Popup Maker to create a new popup that lets visitors choose their preferred language experience.
Get started today and create your own multilingual WordPress website!
