Is It Time to Build a Multilingual Website?
In the last two years, nearly every prospect who has contacted us about a new website has asked about multi-language support.
Of the organizations that do business internationally, roughly ninety percent have required some type of translation. At least twenty percent of the United States based companies we talk to, including those in healthcare and manufacturing, want to offer their content in both English and Spanish.
Companies are pursuing multilingual websites to maintain a competitive edge and expand their visibility to a broader audience. It is an especially good time to do so, because the tools for translation keep getting better. Advanced automated translation APIs combined with the robust multi-site capabilities of Craft CMS have made multilingual sites easier to develop, more affordable to maintain, and faster to see return on investment.
Modern translation tools make it easier than ever to serve the same content in multiple languages without duplicating effort.
What is a multilingual website?
You may have heard terms such as multi-language, multi-regional, or localized used when people talk about website translations. The solution we implement most often is a multilingual website in a very specific sense.
- It is one website that serves users regardless of their geographic location.
- It offers essentially the same content translated into multiple languages.
- Users can select the language they prefer using a dropdown menu or a clearly labeled toggle.
- Each page has a unique URL in each language.
Typically the site’s top-level domain stays the same while the first segment of the URL indicates the desired language, for example example.com/en for English and example.com/es for Spanish. Some sites prefer to use a country-code extension with their top-level domain instead, such as example.de for German.
How are multilingual sites better than the alternative?
It is fair to ask why a company should pursue a multilingual website when free alternatives exist. In our experience, a well planned multilingual site offers a superior customer experience that is worth the investment because it prioritizes translation quality, brand voice, and long term maintainability.
Before we dig into the benefits, it helps to look at the two main alternatives we see in the wild.
Translation widgets such as Google Translate
In years past, the Google Translate widget was the go-to solution to automatically add translations to a site. It is still available by request for some non-commercial use cases, but we do not recommend relying on it as a long term solution for a business website.
A quick web search will turn up several third-party plugins and drop-in JavaScript widgets that promise automatic translations. Those can be useful in limited situations, but they usually come with tradeoffs: inconsistent quality, limited control over phrasing, and a layer of technical risk you do not fully own.
Translation in the web browser
Major browsers including Chrome, Safari, and Edge have built-in translation features. Some of your users are likely already browsing your site with an automatic translation turned on.
Browser translations can be handy for quick comprehension, but they are not tuned to your business, your tone of voice, or your legal and compliance requirements. They also introduce uncertainty; you cannot easily predict what a call to action or a headline will say in a given context once the browser rewrites it on the fly.
If your organization already depends on translation to serve international audiences, a first-class multilingual site can turn that reality into a better customer experience instead of an afterthought.
A multilingual website, by contrast, lets you stay in control. You decide how content is translated, reviewed, and published. You can prioritize important pages, protect legal language, and ensure navigation, calls to action, and product information say exactly what you intend in each language.
What clients are saying
The quality of modern translation services has improved dramatically. We hear especially strong feedback about DeepL when clients compare it to other tools.
One client evaluating translation services is a native Spanish speaker. She wrote an email to her husband in Spanish, then had DeepL translate it to English.
When she got home, she asked if he found anything odd about her email; he said he did not. Other translation services did not come close in her view.
That kind of story is becoming more common.
— Jarad Johnson, Mostly Serious
Three questions to ask before pursuing a multilingual website
The potential benefits and return on investment for a multilingual website will always depend on your organization’s context. These three questions can help you decide whether the timing and opportunity are right.
- Is there an immediate need for another translation?
- Will adding multiple languages create an opportunity for growth?
- Can you scale and maintain multiple translations over time?
1. Is there an immediate need for another translation?
You may already recognize a clear need for another language based on what you know about your current customer base. If you serve bilingual communities, international buyers, or regions with a strong preference for a language other than English, your gut may already be telling you that a translation would be helpful.
You can also review your site’s analytics to see what language your visitors’ web browsers are using. Google Analytics and similar tools report this data, which can help you quantify how many visitors arrive with Spanish, German, or other languages set as their primary preference.
Language data in analytics tools can validate what you already suspect about who is visiting your site and what languages they prefer.
Beyond the data, we also encourage clients to consider users who technically browse in English but would still prefer their first language if it were available. Our team offers quantitative and qualitative customer research to understand how many of your customers fall into that category and how much of a difference a translated experience could make.
2. Will adding multiple languages create an opportunity for growth?
A multilingual site can support growth in several ways.
- Increased customer engagement, as users interact with content in their first language instead of translating it mentally.
- Increased customer satisfaction, because your site offers a more considerate, customer-centric experience than competitors who only publish in one language.
- Increased traffic from search, because your site gains new URLs and keywords in other languages and markets.
In one case study, adding additional languages led to roughly a thirty percent increase in overall traffic. Visitors entered the site from search engine result pages with their preferred language already selected, which meant less friction on the first visit and higher intent when they arrived.
If even a fraction of your audience would prefer another language, offering a translated experience can be a competitive advantage, not just a nice-to-have.
3. Can you scale and maintain the translations?
Clients are right to ask about the cost and time involved in keeping a large site with multiple translations up to date. The good news is that with the right tools, the answer can be a confident yes.
This is where the solution we have developed on Craft CMS has proven especially valuable. We built a custom module that combines DeepL’s automated translation with the opportunity for human author review and control.
- Authors can choose to manually or automatically translate every piece of content on the site.
- Automatic translation is controlled with a simple toggle switch so you can opt in page by page or section by section.
- The control panel provides a real-time cost estimate for automated translations based on the number of characters to be translated.
- Authors can edit and lock a translation if they want to preserve it as is, even if the source language changes later.
For many organizations, this approach has been dramatically more affordable than hiring a full team of translators for every update. At DeepL’s API pricing tier for up to five million characters, automated translations can often be covered for around one hundred thirty dollars per month.
Multilingual websites are intuitive to manage within Craft CMS
Out of the box, Craft CMS offers multi-site and multiple site group capabilities that make it a strong fit for multilingual experiences. You can add any number of site groups and multiple translations within a single group while still giving authors a single, unified control panel.
A typical configuration might look like this:
- Site Group — Your Corporate Site
- Site — Your Corporate Site / English
- Site — Your Corporate Site / Spanish
- Site Group — Your Nonprofit Foundation
- Site — Your Nonprofit Foundation / English
- Site — Your Nonprofit Foundation / Spanish
All of these sites are editable from the same control panel, and Craft’s author experience is highly customizable, extensible, and granular.
- Content can be enabled and disabled on a per-site basis.
- Content can be automatically translated, manually translated, or a blend of both.
- Permissions and workflows can be tuned so subject matter experts review translations before they go live.
As a Craft CMS Enterprise partner, we spend a lot of time thinking about how these tools can make authors’ lives easier and save time. When multilingual sites are set up well, authors feel in control instead of overwhelmed.
Is it time to add multiple languages to your site?
Adding multiple languages to your site may be the next meaningful growth opportunity for your organization. It can help you serve existing customers more thoughtfully, reach new audiences, and turn translation from an informal workaround into a predictable, high quality part of your digital experience.
Our team has worked hard to develop a solution that does not compromise translation quality, keeps authors in control of content, remains easy to scale, and keeps costs under control.
If it sounds like a good fit for your organization, we would love to talk about what a multilingual site could look like for you.
When you are ready to explore the next steps, get in touch with our team.