It all started when a customer asked us if we could internationalize his website as you had done with ours.
It had been a year since we decided to translate our website into several languages and our success was passed on to our clients, who wanted to replicate our strategy.
He has asked other web design agencies for a quote to create my website in different languages. He tells us that the prices they have given him to translate his website with various systems are very different and as we did successfully on our website he asked for our opinion.
After several meetings, we explained to our client that internationalizing a company through its web is not only about creating different languages. We reviewed the web structure, in this case developed with WordPress, we optimized the server to increase performance in different countries, we made the translations through artificial intelligence with Google Cloud and Deepl, we made the translations through database to optimize performance among many other things.
In this post you will find all the steps we did to make ourselves known around the world with our own website and that are currently benefiting some of our customers.
Table of Contents
Web translation in several languages
There are many ways to translate your website, at this point you will learn which one is the best and why.
Translation system for WordPress
One of the keys to translate your web page is to choose a good system that allows us to translate our web quickly. We use plugins to translate your web in several languages, I will divide this part in two main systems to take into account.
Most WordPress translation plugins use a system where you duplicate your content to offer it in different languages. The main problem with this type of plugin is loss of performance. By duplicating the code, the web page will have to double the performance to load more HTML, javascript and CSS content, so for us this is one of the systems we advise against.
The best method to translate your website is by calling the database, so this type of plugin will not duplicate your content, thus optimizing the loading speed. This system is designed not to damage the performance of your web, one of the reference plugins that allows this type of translation is Translatepress.
How to translate your texts correctly?
At this point I will describe the 3 ways to translate your texts.
First there are the tools of automatic translation as Google Translate or Deepl. Although it helps us to translate our website quickly and free of charge, it is the worst of the three available ways, since it will generate numerous errors in the translation that search engines will later take into account to position your website.
Secondly, you can find a human translator for your texts. Professional text translator service is the best of the three methods to translate your web page but the most expensive option.
Thirdly, there are translation tools by artificial intelligence, where texts are translated automatically in a more natural way and that can be the best option in quality-price. Services that you can find to translate your page by artificial intelligence are Google Cloud Translate and Deepl API.
We have our website translated using Deepl API and we check the grammar of the translated texts with Grammarly. I thought it was the best solution and it is already giving us benefits by positioning our website in new countries where we did not have visitors like France, England, Belgium and the United States.
Improve loading speed in different locations
If you want to know why the cloud systems to improve the web speed emerged, the title of this point solves the problem. To solve the problem of loading speed in different countries, we mount servers that load your web page in different locations, thus mounting a Cloud system of servers.
Currently a website is located on a single server, is the basic hosting that is hired for the website design, development of online stores or mobile application.
To make it easy for you to understand. For example, our agency App Design, A year ago, I had a single VPS server located in France where our website was set up. The web loading performance from Spain and London was really fast, around 0.4 seconds.
But when you uploaded the website from the United States, the loading times increased to 8 seconds.
We decided to set up the language systems in English and to solve the problem we used the largest network of servers around the world that use AWS and Google Cloud.
Once the Cloud system was mounted and the cache copy was generated in the United States, loading times went from 8 to 1 second.
Review translations of our website
Check the correct translation of your website through Google Webmaster tools. Google will automatically check the translations of our website, generating hreflang tags and solving the problems of duplicate content for different languages on our website.
To check it manually you can make a consultation in the Sistrix hreflang check tool:
Conclusion
Before entering the world of internationalizing a website, consult with an experienced expert. There are many points to take into account and to do a good job you will need to do all the points correctly.
If you need help to assemble your website in different languages and reach new markets around the world, contact us.
