Why is a multilingual website important?

Why should you language version your website?

A language-versioned or multilingual website is essentially a website where all or part of the content is available in multiple languages.

In principle, there is no upper limit to the number of language versions a website can have. An example at the heavy end is jv.org, which has more than 1000 language versions. An average language-versioned website has 33 language versions.

A good multilingual website can also be localised in areas other than language. For example, the design can be thematised to match cultural differences and best (UX) practices in your local markets.

Another critical point where there is often reason to differentiate is in relation to keyword ranking. It's important that the texts contain localised keywords and that they are included in the meta titles and meta descriptions of the page.

Finally, a language-versioned website contributes to better conversion and signals that you are a global business.

Language versioning - which strategy should you choose?

The strategy you choose for your language-versioned website depends on your ambition and the resources you have available for the task of creating the content and its subsequent maintenance.

Which language versions should your website have?

The approach you choose should be based on your business and the markets/users you want to position yourself to.

1. If you want to expand your business to new countries, it's an advantage if new users can access the website and information about your business, products and services in their native language.
2. Another, more generic strategy is to translate your website into the most spoken languages in the world.

Historically, a website was "global" if it had 5-6 language versions, with an emphasis on English. Today, the picture is different, with 44% of internet users being English, Spanish or Chinese speakers. The rest - more than half - is made up of a very diverse range of nationalities. Source: The 2021 Web Globalisation Report Card.

There is no rule of thumb for how many languages a website should have. How many languages your website should support depends on your vision, resources and goals. However, one thing is certain; the more internet users you want to reach, the more languages your website should support.

How much content needs to be translated?

If you have a website with extensive content, it can be a daunting task to start translating thousands of pages into, say, ten new languages. That's why some companies and organisations choose a phased roll-out of language versioning.

1. You choose to translate the most important landing pages, product pages or contact pages into the new languages. It's a quick and dirty solution and its value depends entirely on where the user is in their decision-making process. If the user is in a phase where the focus is on gathering information to make a decision, it is critical if only a fraction of the relevant and necessary information is available in a language the user can understand.
2. You choose to launch one language at a time and translate all content. If you choose this approach, it's a good idea to start with a language that the majority of your users and potential customers read and understand.

Language version with your own domain or as a subdomain

For example, if you have a Danish website that you want a French version of, you can choose to place the Danish content at www.website.dk and the French content at www.website.fr. The extension will automatically indicate to both users and Google which language the content is in.

Another strategy is to use an international domain such as www.website.com. The language of the www.website.com domain can be either Danish or French, as long as you are consistent in your choice. If you are not, your ranking may suffer because search engines do not get a clear indication of the language.

If you use an international domain such as .com, .net, .io, .eu, .nu or .org where the language is Danish, you can place your French language version in either the subdomain www.fr.website.com or subfolders www.website.com/fr/.

Indexing language versions

To ensure good global ranking, it's important that your website's different language versions are indexed by Google and other search engines relevant to users.

When choosing your domain, it's a good idea to consider which search engine your users primarily use. There is a big difference between what Google and Bing, for example, look for to identify the language structure of your website.

Google finds and indexes the relevant language version primarily based on hreflang tags. The search engine Bing is not as good at identifying language versions based on hreflang tags, but primarily identifies the language version based on the domain name and the meta tag "Content Language".

Multi-language and internal site search

Many larger websites have an internal search function where users can search for arbitrary words or phrases. In order for the search function to deliver a relevant search result for a given search and in the right language, your CMS needs to have a search index for each language variant in your solution.

At the same time, the search function must take special characters and signs into account. For example, in Danish we have æ, ø, å and in German the character ß, which some international search frameworks do not initially recognise. In these cases, it is necessary to enrich the search functionality.

Whether indexing content in the Google index or internally in your CMS, it's crucial that you have a web provider that can ensure that the right language versions are available to both search engines and users visiting your website.

CMS and language versioning

The success of your language versioning strategy depends largely on the Customer Management System you use, as well as the knowledge and experience of your web service provider.

The vast majority of our web solutions are developed in Umbraco CMS. Out of the box, they all have excellent handling of multiple language variants.

In Umbraco CMS, we allow you to create as many language variants of your site as you need. Your language variants are linked together, so you can keep an overview when updating content that needs to appear in several different languages.

When you need to make corrections to your content later on, Umbraco makes sure you remember to publish your corrections in all languages or just the ones you have set as mandatory.

Multi-language and translation tools

Seamless collaboration between content editors in the main language and the translators or translation agencies that translate the content into the other languages is crucial to the final result and the value the language versions will bring to your business.

If you have a multinational website with a deep content structure where content needs to be translated 1:1, it can be an advantage to build special workflows into your CMS that handle the internal processes related to content translation.

Translation Manager, iPlus and Umbraco CMS

In some of our solutions, we create a customised workflow that makes it easy for a content editor to send page content for translation by an external translator.

Translation Manager is a licensed plug-in for Umbraco CMS. Translation Manager can extract all text sections from a page and deliver it in a format that we send directly into the translation agency's translation software. The clever thing is that our solution keeps track of what are headings, body text and meta-texts and sends the translated text sections directly back to the right place in the page structure. Then it's just a matter of approving and publishing the language versioned page.