Decide the URL structure first
| Structure | Suits |
|---|---|
| /de/, /fr/ subdirectories | Most businesses — simplest, consolidates authority |
| Separate domains per country | Genuinely separate operations |
| Subdomains | Rarely the best choice |
Subdirectories are right for most businesses. Changing this later means redirecting every URL on the site, so decide before building.
Get the language annotations right
- Every page declares its own language
- Each language version points at every other, including itself
- The declared language matches the actual content
- A default is specified for unmatched languages
Broken language annotations are the most common technical fault on multilingual sites and they are invisible until traffic does not appear.
Translate properly or not at all
Machine translation published without review reads badly and damages credibility in that market. Either invest in proper translation for the pages that matter, or do not offer that language.
A well-translated ten-page site outperforms a poorly-translated hundred-page one.
What else needs translating
- Form labels, validation messages and confirmations
- Email notifications sent to customers
- Menu items, buttons and error pages
- Meta titles and descriptions, not just body content
Half-translated sites are common because these are forgotten, and they are what visitors notice.
Plan the maintenance
Every content change now needs doing several times. Decide who does that and how you will know when a translation is out of date.
Sites that fall out of sync between languages are worse than single-language sites, because the stale version is still being read.