Why Multilingual Matters
In many markets, a significant portion of your potential customers prefer to browse and buy in a language other than English. In the United States alone, over 40 million people speak Spanish as their primary language at home. In border cities like Tucson, that number is even more relevant.
A multilingual website shows respect for your customers' language preferences and removes a barrier to doing business. When someone can read about your services in their preferred language, they are more likely to trust you, understand your offerings, and convert into a paying customer.
Translation Approaches
There are several ways to translate website content, each with different quality levels and costs:
- Professional human translation: The highest quality option. A professional translator produces natural, culturally appropriate content. Best for important pages like service descriptions, about pages, and legal content
- Bilingual staff: If you have team members who are fluent in both languages, they can translate content with the added benefit of knowing your business and terminology
- Machine translation with editing: Use tools like Google Translate or DeepL for a first draft, then have a fluent speaker review and correct the output. This is faster and cheaper than fully manual translation but still produces decent results
- Fully automated translation: Plugins that auto-translate content in real time. Quick and cheap but often produces awkward, incorrect, or confusing text. Not recommended for business-critical pages
Technical Implementation
From a technical standpoint, there are two main approaches to structuring a multilingual website:
Subdirectories (example.com/es/ for Spanish) are the most common and generally recommended approach. All content lives under one domain, which consolidates your search engine authority. Each language gets its own folder structure that mirrors the main site.
Subdomains (es.example.com) or separate domains (example.es) are alternatives. Separate domains can be useful if you are targeting different countries with very different content, but they split your domain authority and require more maintenance.
Regardless of the approach, you need to implement hreflang tags. These HTML attributes tell search engines which language each page is in and which pages are translations of each other. Without hreflang tags, search engines may show the wrong language version to users or treat your translated pages as duplicate content.
Language Switching
Visitors need an easy way to switch between languages. A language selector should be visible on every page, typically in the header or footer. Use the language name written in that language (Espanol, not Spanish; Deutsch, not German) so speakers of each language can recognize their option.
Avoid using flags as language indicators. A flag represents a country, not a language. Spanish is spoken in over 20 countries, and using a single flag excludes speakers from all the others. Text-based language labels are universally understood and avoid cultural missteps.
SEO for Multilingual Sites
A properly implemented multilingual website can rank in search results for both languages, effectively doubling your search visibility. But getting the SEO right requires attention to detail:
- Each language version should have its own URL, not rely on JavaScript or cookies to swap content
- Meta titles and descriptions should be translated, not just the body content
- Hreflang tags must be implemented correctly on every page
- Each language version should be submitted to Google Search Console separately
- Internal links within each language version should stay within that language
Content Considerations
Translation is not just about converting words from one language to another. Cultural context matters. Idioms, humor, date formats, number formats, and even color associations can vary between cultures. A good translation adapts the message, not just the vocabulary.
You also need to decide which content to translate. Not everything needs to be available in every language. Start with your most important pages: homepage, service pages, contact page, and any pages that drive conversions. Blog posts and secondary content can be added over time as resources allow.
Design and Layout
Different languages take up different amounts of space. German text is typically longer than English. Arabic and Hebrew read right to left. Chinese and Japanese characters have different sizing requirements. Your website design needs to accommodate these differences without breaking the layout.
Build flexibility into your design from the start. Use layouts that can expand gracefully when text is longer. Test your translated pages on multiple screen sizes to make sure nothing overflows, overlaps, or gets cut off. For related guidance, see our page on mobile web design.
Maintaining a Multilingual Site
The biggest ongoing challenge of a multilingual website is keeping content in sync. When you update a page in your primary language, the translated version needs to be updated too. Without a clear process for this, translated pages quickly become outdated.
Establish a workflow for content updates. When a page changes in the primary language, flag the corresponding translated page for review. Content management systems with built-in multilingual support can automate parts of this process, but human review is still essential for quality.