Linguise – How to translate your WordPress Website Automatically [Tutorial]

In the following article, I will show you how to translate your WordPress website automatically using Linguise. If you don’t know what Linguise is, check our Linguise review.

In a nutshell, Linguise helps you create a multilingual WordPress website in a few minutes. We also added Linguise to our best WordPress translator plugin lists so you can see how it ranks beside the competitors before going further.

I consider Linguise one of the best and most affordable solutions to translate your website. That’s why I recommend it.

1. What is Linguise

Linguise is an automatic translation tool designed to help WordPress website owners transform their websites into multilingual businesses and reach new audiences. Now you can effortlessly translate your website into more than 80 languages with the help of their proprietary machine translations technology.

Linguise uses Google’s popular NMT models to ensure you get the most accurate translations for your content. In addition, if you find a translation that could have been better, you can edit and change it from your website’s front end.

Besides WordPress, you can integrate Linguise with any PHP-based CMS like Drupal, Magento, OpenCart, or any custom setup, but that’s out of the scope of this tutorial.

Check the video below to find out in a nutshell what Linguise is and how it can help you:

Now that you know what Linguise is, let’s start our step-by-step tutorial and set up Linguise on our website.

2. Signup to Linguise

The first step is to go to Linguise.com and choose a pricing plan. Each new signup gets a one-month free trial of 600K translated words which is the correspondent of the PRO plan that costs $25/mo. The pricing plans are: $15/month for 200K translated words, $25/mo for 600K words, and $45/unlimited words.

You can easily upgrade or downgrade through the plans, so after the free trial, you can quickly go on with the START plan and upgrade to a bigger one if you need more words or add more languages.

You can easily create an account by filling out the signup form with your email address and a password you choose or registering with your Google or Microsoft account.

After you confirm your account, you can access the Linguise dashboard. You can add website domains for translations, check the stats, edit translations, add new languages, etc.

3. Add your website

The next step after you register on Linguise is to add your domain to the platform. As shown in the picture below, we have a domain on the trial plan and a domain on the UNLIMITED paid plan.

After you click on the “Add domain,” you will have to fill out a form with the details of the website, the domain name, the base language, and the languages you want to translate the content to.

You also can choose if you would translate the URLs or not and what the translated URLs would look like. For instance, the URL: monetize.info/linguise-translate-WordPress-website can be in Spanish monetize.info/es/linguise-traducir-WordPress-sitio-web or monetize.info/es/linguise-translate-WordPress-website if you choose not to translate the URLs.

I suggest you choose to translate the URLs to get better chances to rank in local keywords.

If at a later date, you want to add more languages or change these settings, you can do it in the settings tab of your Linguise dashboard.

After completing the setup wizard, you’ll get an API key which we will use to connect the Linguise dashboard to your website. So save it, as we’ll need this key later.

Now that we have the API key, the next step is to install the connector between Linguise and your WordPress website, which it’s the Linguise WordPress plugin.

4. Install & Configure the WordPress plugin

Go to your WordPress admin dashboard and add the Linguise plugin from the WP repository. Please search for the Linguise plugin and then install and activate it.

After activating the Linguise plugin, go to the Linguise settings page and add your API to customize your website’s language configuration. After you click Apply, you should see the languages you configured to translate in the “Translate your website into” field.

The next thing you should do is configure the language switcher if you choose to add one. If your primary traffic comes from search engines, you may decide not to show any language switcher, as visitors will go directly to translated content.

On the other hand, if you use multiple traffic-generating methods, I recommend adding the language switcher so users can select the language for reading your website.

5. Adding Language Switcher

There are two options to add the language switcher. You can use the built-in Linguise language switcher or add it manually to the menu. In this Linguise tutorial, we will cover both methods.

5.1 Add Language Switcher automatically

If you add the language switcher automatically by the Linguise tool, you can select between three ways: Side by side, Dropdown, or a Pop-up with the languages. Also, you can configure the position of the switcher if you show flags and language names, etc.

As you can see in the picture above, there are plenty of settings to configure the language switcher to show as you want. I use the Pop-up one for my sites.

5.2 Add Language Switcher in the menu

To customize the language switcher, you get three options: WordPress menu item, PHP snippet, and Shortcode.

You get more custom options for every method, such as choosing the display style and position and enabling/disabling the Flag and Language name.

Adding the Language Switcher menu item is pretty straightforward. Go to WP Admin > Appearance > Menus. Select the Linguise Languages checkbox and click on the Add to menu button.

And that’s it! You have successfully added the language switcher on your website’s front, and visitors can switch to any language of their choice from the list of options. If you wish to change the position of the switcher, drag and drop the switcher in the desired position, or you can even choose a different menu, for instance, the one in the website’s footer.

That’s it. You just integrated your WordPress website with Linguise, and the translation has already started on the Linguise servers. You can test everything by visiting your website’s public area, choosing a language different from your base, and browsing around.

6. Linguise Website Dashboard

The Linguise dashboard shows precisely how many words have been translated, which language receives the most visitors, and the top 20 most visited pages of your website in the last 30 days.

Now let’s continue our tutorial on how to translate your WordPress website with Linguise by looking at another essential page of your Linguise account.

7. Live Translations Editor

Apart from the list of options in the dashboard, you get an option to launch the live editor in the menu.

The live editor opens the websites in your preferred translated form and lets you change the text you think could improve.

To change a text, select it, type the alternate text, and click the Save button.

You can also edit the meta details, such as the title and description. Click the Edit Meta button in the top right corner to display the meta description.

If you are not a fan of the live translators or want to edit something later, I recommend you check the Translation management tab.

You can easily find, replace or edit the translated text using the Translation Management functionality.

8. Translation Rules

Moreover, you can set up translation rules from the dashboard to ignore, replace or exclude content depending on the parameters. For example, your brand name might not be translated correctly, and to fix this, you can set up a custom translation rule to replace the text precisely with the translation you have provided.

If you look at the picture above, you see several translation issues. For instance, our brand is translated with errors. You can fix it in the translation management panel on each language or set up a translation rule to ignore the brand name or a specific URL. Also, you can select a particular CSS selector to miss from being translated.

You can use the Exclusion by URL rule to exclude some URLs from being translated.

While the automatic machine learning-based translations are super easy and quick to integrate, you can use these options to set up rules or change a piece of text to make it more accurate.

9. International SEO Settings

One important aspect of translating your website into multiple languages is to get organic traffic from these languages. To do that, you have to take care of international SEO. Fortunately, Linguise is taking care of them as well.

9.1 Language identifier

Your URL structure helps Google figure out which of your pages to show searchers in different countries and spoken languages. This is part of geo-targeting, which focuses on location. There are three primary language identifiers you can use in your language structure:

• A separate website for each language using a ccTLD domain (ex: brand.com, brand.ca, brand.co.uk)
• A subdomain for each language (ex: es.brand.com, ru.brand.com)
• A subfolder for each language (ex: brand.com/es, brand.com/pt, brand.com/ru)

Each method has its PROs and CONs. Linguise is using the last one, creating automatically separate URLs using a language identifier for each language.

9.2Alternate Href lang

International content is often a translation of English-language pages to multiple other languages. That means you end up with a different version of the same page and a similar URL for each language, which means these versions could compete in search results. A hreflang tag accompanies each URL version across your website, helping to avoid this competition.

Linguise setup these alternate hreflang tags automatically into your WordPress website. You can turn these off into Linguise settings, but I recommend not to.

9.3 Sitemap

To improve your crawlability by search engines, you should send sitemaps for the multilanguage URLs to these search engines. In Google, you do that in the Search Console, in Bing in the Bing Webmasters, while in Yandex, you have Yandex Webmasters.

Linguise is also helping you here, as it creates separate sitemaps for each language you configure as long as you have an SEO plugin that generates the sitemap in your base language.

Add these sitemaps to search engines to ensure your translated pages are crawled and indexed. I recommend not adding all-new sitemaps at once but doing it step by step every month to ensure you’re not exhausting your crawl budget.

10 Plans management

As I’ve told you at the beginning of this tutorial, Linguise comes in 3 plans capped at 200K translated words, 600K translated words, and finally, the unlimited plan.

In the Manage subscription tab, you can activate a plan during your free trial or when this ends. You will pay only the difference if you switch to a higher plan to get more words.

Conclusion on how to translate your website

And there you have it—our complete step-by-step tutorial on how to translate your WordPress website using Linguise. If you follow all these steps, you will have a multilingual website ready to target new audiences and bring you more visitors, conversions, and sales.

If you have questions about how to translate your WordPress website or get stuck at some step of this tutorial, please write in the comments form below, and I will happily help you.