WordPress is this huge content management system, which found the way to success through the tools called plugins that allow you to do this thing or that thing efficiently. Despite the massive number of plugins in the WordPress sphere, few of them are actually innovative and really help you save time, money, and do the job as you would love. One of those few WordPress plugins is Weglot.
Weglot is a SaaS app that helps you translate your website content into different languages. Weglot is powered by an API which allows you to automatically translate your web content into as many languages as you want without any prior coding skills. When you hear “automatic translation” it is easy to think Weglot translation works like that of search engines, so you might have doubts regarding the quality of the output. Well, surprisingly, the translated content is professional and of high quality.
Weglot as a service helps businesses, bloggers, and webmasters solve three major problems: save time, save money, and don’t sacrifice quality. They’re serving more than 30,000 users worldwide and it seems that people love them(at least, according to the 5-star reviews that the WordPress plugin got).
It’s a no-brainer for businesses, especially those that are largely activating in eCommerce, that having the content in different languages in order to attract customers from locations or countries other than theirs is a must-have. Likewise, bloggers having content in multiple languages helps them reach a wider base of audience. However, generally speaking, translating the content into various languages is quite a major problem, and for good reasons.
For instance, to translate your content, you might have to outsource to individuals who have knowledge of the both original and translated languages. This phenomenon would cost you money, and the amount you pay depends on the amount of content you want to translate.
Putting it differently, human translation has costs. This is where Weglot comes into the scene because with Weglot, you now have the right tool under your belt to properly translate your website into multiple languages.
That said, let’s move over to the features of Weglot and see what it can and can’t do.
Features
Easy to Integrate
The ease of integration is one of the amazing benefits of using Weglot. As a website owner or admin, all you have to do is to download the Weglot plugin or just add a script to your website. Weglot will get to the work, translating your content. Since it’s a SaaS app, there shouldn’t be problems related to integrating Weglot with your CMS. Also, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to set up the website.
Additionally, because of the SaaS approach, Weglot is compatible with any WordPress theme or plugins and is less prone to any form of conflict. Even with the real-time translation feature, Weglot doesn’t affect speed and performance of your website.
User-Friendly Interface for Managing Translations
After integrating Weglot as part of your website, you will now be able to translate the content. Weglot comes with a cloud-based dashboard and it’s that place from where you can change settings, access the translation tools, statistics and so on.
To manage your translations, and to decide which ones should be worked on, you should head over to the ‘Translations List’ – the section that showcases the content you have translated on your website.
One of the features that I like is ruling certain words as ‘never translate’ which implies that you don’t want certain words to be translated.
Powerful Translation Process: Manual, Automatic or Hybrid
One of the reasons Weglot is an innovative tool is particularly because of its powerful translation process. Weglot helps you decide which form of translation you want to use: manual, automatic, or hybrid. While some WordPress translation plugins only allow you to translate web content manually, Weglot automates the process. Even with the automatic translation of content, Weglot still gives you the choice of manually editing the translated content just in case you are not satisfied or want to further polish the translation. This comes as a vital addition as you can fine-tune the language to local dialects and leave out slang words.
As an extra feature, with Weglot, you have access to professional and highly-skilled translators. You can order your translation right from the dashboard and have your content translated.
Dozens of Languages Available
Weglot has the capability to translate content into more than 100 unique languages. This implies that you can translate from or to English, French, Catalan, Spanish, German, and a host of languages all around the world. Notwithstanding, the tool doesn’t support different versions of the same language. This implies that there is only one version of English, French, Spanish, and so on. However, I the team is constantly working on improving the tool, so contacting Weglot support to get further information on a certain language should answer some of your questions.
SEO Friendly
For websites which rely heavily on search engine optimization, Weglot can handle it! Weglot complies to Google’s recommendations and their outlined best practices regarding SEO and multilingual web platforms. With Weglot, there is absolutely no need to have an additional plugin for content indexing as al procedures to comply with Google’s SEO practices are made automatically. Hence, each page that has been translated has its own unique URL with the relevant hreflang tags being added automatically. The only downside here and some people might find it an issue, is that you cannot modify/translate the original page URL.
SaaS Approach to Translating Websites
SaaS (Software as a Service) is a medium for delivering software solutions to consumers via the cloud. For the past decade, SaaS solutions have inundated the technology sphere. However, the platform that powers 30 percent of the world’s websites –WordPress as a blogging platform – hasn’t been penetrated as much as other sectors.
In recent years, especially with the introduction of WooCommerce, there has been a rise in the amount of SaaS solutions being provided to the WordPress community. With SaaS solutions, users do not need to download the software for offline/internal use as it can be accessed anytime via the internet, freeing the users from maintenance issues. Weglot works in exactly the same way as any SaaS solution. With Weglot, users work from a cloud-based dashboard. Therefore, issues like maintenance, storage, and security are the full responsibility of the Weglot team.
Platforms & Integrations
Like I mentioned above, Weglot can be integrated into many platforms, with solutions available for WordPress, Jimdo, BigCommerce, Shopify, and others. Third party integration is estimated to take just about 5 minutes. If you’re not running your website on a popular CMS, you can easily integrate Weglot API into your pages by using a JavaScript code snippet together with your personal API key.
Pricing
Weglot is following a freemium approach, offering multiple plans, including a forever-free plan. The pricing is majorly focused on the number of words the user can translate.
The Free Plan
The free plan is very limited as you can only translate 2,000 words – good for one-page websites with less than 5000 monthly pageviews. Also, the free plan limits your foreign languages to just one. As a tip, you may want to head over to Google Analytics to see which foreign country you are receiving the most traffic from and translate the website into it. On the other hand, you can invite unlimited team members to your dashboard to help you manage the translations.
Premium Plans
For bloggers and big businesses that need to push out content regularly and in a large amount, the premium plans will cover their needs. Starting at $9.9 per month, each pricing tier adds a series of extra features like access to pro translators, automatic visitors language redirections, the possibility to use Weglot on multiple websites, statistics, exports and dedicated support. Pretty neat!
Conclusion
Weglot is a powerful solution for anyone looking to translate a website into multiple languages. It’s easy to use, SEO friendly and flexible enough with the translation process. If you’re searching for a multilingual solution that doesn’t hamper your website’s speed and performance, check out Weglot.
