Weglot: An Extensive Review of the Multilingual Translation Platform

If you are looking for a translation plugin for your WordPress site, there’s a good chance that you’ve come across a plugin called Weglot. 50,000+ businesses have already used this easy-to-use translation plugin for WordPress. And so, Weglot isn’t really a newcomer to the translation scene anymore. After using Weglot several times, we can see why they’ve been successful. In this Weglot review, we’ll show you how the plugin works to help you translate your site and manage those translations. Then, we’ll discuss what you should consider when deciding if Weglot is right for you.

Weglot Overview

The market has a lot of solutions to offer in the market. Among the solutions we found, we’ve come across Weglot. Weglot is known for its lightest and easiest yet highly performing translation plugin. It is indeed, without a doubt, one of the best translation solutions that are made for your translation dilemmas. In addition to that, it will help your site optimize and become SEO friendly. 

Weglot has a free plan that allows you to translate up to 2,000 words into one language, which might work for a small static site. But if you’re running a blog or anything with lengthier content, you’ll need to go with one of the paid plans.

Unlike most other translation plugins, Weglot uses SaaS-style billing.

That means that instead of a one-time purchase price + optional yearly renewals to continue with support and updates, you’ll pay a monthly fee for as long as you want to keep using the plugin. If you want to stop paying, Weglot will help you export your translations, but you’ll need to find a way to get them to actually display on your site. This SaaS billing is the price you pay for all that convenience and the cool cloud dashboard.

Pricing

• Starter – €99/year good for 1 translated language and caters 10,000 word
• Business – €190/year good for 3 translated languages and caters 50,000 words
• Pro – €490/year good for 5 translated languages and caters 200,000 words
• Advanced – €1,990/year good for 10 translated languages and caters 1,000,000 words
• Enterprise – €4,990 starting price. Usage and service will be further explained after giving them a call.

Take note that, in addition to charging for the number of translated words, Weglot also charges by page views. Don’t worry, though. If you’re using caching, Weglot won’t count traffic to already-cached pages. It will only count the visit that builds the cache. That means, with caching in place, you can stretch those pageview limits a lot higher. For that reason, worry more about the number of words than the page view limit when choosing the plan. 

Weglot Key Features

As we get into the smaller features in a second, here is the biggest thing that differentiates Weglot from other WordPress translation plugins – As soon as you install and activate the plugin, it will automatically translate your entire site using machine translation.

So whereas most other translation plugins set you up with a blank slate that you need to fill in translations for, Weglot sets you up with an already translated site. Then, to refine those machine-generated translations, you can use Weglot’s interface to:

• Manually edit translations in two different ways
• Outsource your translations to a professional editing service (which, obviously will cost an extra if you want to do it)

Beyond that machine-generated translation feature, here are the other specific features that Weglot has going for it:

• It translates every single string on your site, including Yoast SEO titles, page builder content…everything.
• You can edit your translations using either a .po editor-style interface or a visual interface.
• Optimized SEO structure as the plugin actually creates separate, indexable pages for each language and adds the hreflang tag.
• Included language switcher button so that your site visitors can pick the language that suits them best.
• Automatic redirection based on visitors’ browser language preferences to send people straight to their language (Paid plans only)

We’ve played around with Weglot a lot at this point, so we have a pretty good grasp of how all those features come together. Let’s go hands-on and check them out.

Pros

• Automatic translation is a big plus point as it saves time and effort
• Super quick and easy to turn your website into a multilingual one
• SEO friendly
• You can choose up to 100+ supported languages

Cons

• If you have multiple sites and long articles on each site, we cannot recommend the free version.
• The plans are expensive
• Though machine-generated translated, you still need manual corrections. Not good for big websites

Weglot Installation & Setup

Whether it’s for your eCommerce store and you’re using WordPress, the installation process is still the same. Here’s how you can do it:

Installing Weglot Plugin

Go to the WordPress plugin repository then Add New

After clicking Add New, search for Weglot in the search box above

After seeing the results, find the Weglot plugin then click Install Now

After installing, click the Activate button

Now that the plugin’s already activated, on the WordPress dashboard, you can find that Weglot has been added. Proceed by clicking Weglot.

To settle everything, you need to put the API key which can be seen on your Weglot account. If you don’t have one, you can proceed by creating an account by clicking on the Weglot link. After creating an account, go back to WordPress and put in the API key, then set your original language and choose languages that you want to be translated.

Click on Save Changes and you’re all set. The language button will appear on the bottom right of your site. Try switching on different languages and see how it’s translated. 

Configuring The Language Switcher Button

By default, Weglot adds a language switcher button in the bottom-right corner of your site. That is, you don’t need to do anything to add your language switcher button. But if you want, you have two areas where you can customize it. In the language button appearance area, you can change how the button works. Personally, we like when sites use the full language instead of the language code, so we recommend checking the box for Full name to display the full language name (you’ll see the live preview change whenever you change a button’s settings):

At the bottom, you can also add custom CSS if desired.

Once you’ve configured the style, you can scroll down to the Language button position section to change the button’s position away from the default of the bottom-right corner.

You can:

• Add it to a navigation menu
• Use the included widget to put it in any widget area
• Manually add it using a shortcode
• Add it directly to your theme’s source code using a simple <div> (no PHP required)

While the flexibility is nice – the default placement is pretty solid, so you don’t really need to change anything here:

Excluding Certain Content From Being Translated

As Weglot automatically translates all of the content on your site, you might run into a situation where Weglot is translating something that you don’t actually want to be translated.

If that’s happening, you can use the Translation Exclusion section to manually exclude content by:

• The URL (including regex)
• CSS selectors

The CSS selector option allows you to create something like:

<div class=”notranslate”>Content</div>

Where anything that you include inside that div will not be translated. This is helpful if you just want to exclude specific content but want the rest of the page to still be translated.

And that’s it for the Weglot plugin interface – let’s check out what it looks like on a website.

Checking Out The Translated Version On A Website

Here’s the site in the original English:

And here it is after changing the language switcher to Vietnamese:

Beyond the obvious fact that Weglot successfully translated the actual content in my post, we want to call your attention to three different areas (that is marked in the screenshot above):

• (1) – Weglot has created an entirely new URL so that search engines can index the translated version of the site.
• (2) – Weglot really does translate everything. You can see that it even found the “Search…” placeholder in the search box and translated it.
• (3) – Weglot also rewrites all the internal links on your site so that they use the proper translation. This is important for user experience, as well as the fact that it makes it easy for Google to crawl the entire translated version of your site.

Managing Translations In The Weglot Interface

Once you configure the Weglot plugin, you’ll do pretty much everything else at the Weglot cloud interface. This is where you can: 

• Manage all of the translations on your site
• Manually edit translations
• Order professional translations

You also get some helpful tools that let you:

• Create translation exceptions. These let you manually exclude certain words from being translated
• Run a search and replace on your translations to quickly fix any issues

To actually manage and edit your translations, Weglot gives you two different interfaces:

• Translations List – if you’ve ever used a .po editor, this one should be pretty familiar.
• Visual Editor – this lets you actually click on your live website to translate parts.

Using The Weglot Translations List Editor

In the Translations List, you can:

• Use the options on the left to filter out specific content
• Manage your translations on the right

One thing that’s especially helpful here is that Weglot tracks whether each string is machine translated or has been reviewed by a human. This makes it easy to see what work has already been done. Additionally, you can also quickly add any string to a professional order, if needed:

Using The Weglot Visual Editor

The Visual Editor isn’t quite as efficient for bulk translations, but we like it for translating a single page because it’s user-friendly and lets you visualize everything. When you open it, you’ll see a live preview of your site. You can then click on any of the strings to edit the translation right there:

You can also use the language switcher button in this interface so that you can preview how the translations actually look on the page. Pretty neat!

Verdict

Overall, Weglot is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site and subsequently manage those translations. There’s not really any competition as far as ease of use and thoroughness of translations.

The only thing to remember is that you’re going to pay a premium for that in the form of monthly SaaS billing. We can’t tell whether or not that’s worth it because it depends on your needs and budget. On a pure functionality level, Weglot is worth giving a try. If you are interested, read through the article and see it for yourself. 

Try Weglot Today