With the Editor, you can create high-quality multilingual websites. You can copy each subpage and translate the content or you can create another design for the other languages. In this article, we will show you how it works.
Table of contents
- Basic knowledge
- Set up multiple languages
- Allow website visitors to select a language on the site
- URLs and "hreflang"
- Deactivate multilanguage
Basic knowledge
Multilingual websites created in the Editor recognize the browser language of website visitors and automatically show them the corresponding language if it is available. If your website doesn't have a version corresponding to the visitor's browser language available, the default language will be used.
Set up multiple languages
To illustrate how to add a language to your site, we'll show you how to add a Spanish version to an English website. To activate multilanguage follow these steps:
- Click on More in the right corner of the top menu
- Select Languages to access the language settings
- Click in the field under Multilanguage and select Enable multilanguage
After you have activated multilanguage, you will see that the current default language is already listed. It is greyed out because it cannot be removed or changed. Move your mouse over it and a "+" symbol will pop up on the left side. Click on it to add another language to the project.
Next, click in the empty field to select from a dropdown list of languages. In this case, we would select "Spanish". Then click on the save icon in the menu bar in the upper left corner of the Editor or use the shortcut [Ctrl] + [S] to save the project. Then "Spanish" will be greyed out and can no longer be changed.
The Editor has now duplicated all previously created pages and their contents in the background and stored the necessary language information accordingly.
To edit the subpages in the new language go to Pages. At the top, you can switch between all languages that are activated for a website. In this case, you can switch between English and Spanish.
After adding a new language, only the Home page is automatically activated because there must always be at least one page available per language. As you can see by the name of the page, the language is indicated by the respective ISO abbreviation. In this case, it's "es" for Spanish.
If you want to activate the other pages for a new language, you can click on the Translate button. Please note, that translating means only copying the existing content of the first language - the content will not be translated into the selected language. You will need to translate and exchange the content yourself.
If you want all subpages to be activated by default when adding a new language you can change this setting by opening the burger menu in the top left corner, clicking Preferences, and changing the Language copy mode to Copy all pages.
Please note that changes to the pages that are made in one language do not affect the pages in other languages. So, if the changes should be visible in all languages, you will need to make the adjustments per language.
You can also modify the SEO settings and other details separately for each page of each language.
From now on, the respective pages will no longer be accessible via www.your-domain.com/subpage, but via www.your-domain.com/en/subpage or www.your-domain.com/es/subpage.
Important: When copying pages, new IDs are assigned to all elements. Therefore, we recommend checking that all animations work as desired on the pages of the new language.
Allow website visitors to select a language on the site
As we mentioned before, if a variant of your website that corresponds to a website visitor's browser language is available, the visitor will be directed there automatically. However, you may want to allow your website visitors to decide which version of your website they would like to view by selecting it manually. To add such a selection option, go to the Features category in the sidebar and drag and drop the Languages into your page.
When you double-click on Languages to open the settings panel on the left side and go to Language you can select how the languages should be displayed:
You can choose between country codes, flags, or text.
URLs and "hreflang"
The Editor automatically places "hreflang" for all available languages of the currently accessed page, e.g. www.your-domain.com/en/subpage/, as follows:
"Hreflang" is also used in the language element to tell search engines which language the link leads to. All other links do not contain "hreflang", because in such cases they are always in the same language.
Canonical URLs express the actual URL under which the currently opened page can be reached if it should be accessible via several URLs (to avoid duplicate content) and actually has nothing to do with the languages.
Deactivate multilanguage
If you want to deactivate multilanguage for a website you need to delete all other languages so that there is only one language available. Then you can select Deactivate multilanguage.
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