How to Use TheFour and Weglot to Create a Multilingual WordPress Website

Ideally, your website will have the capacity to reach thousands of users. However, only offering your content in a single language can greatly limit the size of your audience. Moreover, translating an entire website can seem like a tall task, particularly as it grows larger.

This is where Weglot comes in. With the Weglot WordPress plugin, you can simply pick which language you want to translate your content to and let it do its magic. Weglot will automatically detect all your content and enable you to translate it. Plus, you’ll always have full control over your translated content.

In this article, we're going to show you that Weglot works great with the TheFour theme, and talk about why you should translate your website. Then we'll show you how the process works in action using TheFour theme. Let's get to it!

Why Weglot Is the Perfect Choice to Translate Your WordPress Website

Translating a website isn't something you do on a whim. Even 'small' websites can have dozens of thousands of words of content. It’s a lot of work even if you speak your chosen second language fluently.

Translating a website means taking all of your website’s content (such as custom fields, translate the various pages, meta data, blog posts, etc.), and finding a way to display it in a different language. It will take a lot of time to do this manually – without mentioning the myriad problems that could arise, such as translating plugins or complicated themes, and the development time needed to fix it.

Fortunately, you have another alternative available: Weglot. This is an amazing translation plugin that can translate your entire website (even special content like translating custom fields, custom taxonomies, ...) into dozens of languages within minutes.

Moreover, Weglot works great with most WordPress plugins and themes – including our great TheFour theme. Let’s discuss this next.

An Introduction to TheFour

There are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, and the one you pick should be based on what type of website you’d like to build. If you want to design a modern-looking business site, TheFour is an excellent option.

Right off the bat, we can tell you that TheFour works perfectly with Weglot. This means if you use it to build your next website, you'll be able to translate the content into almost any language you want.

More importantly, TheFour also includes a lot of features to make your life easier. For example:

• It packs in a lot of theme options that make setting up a new site simple.
• It's responsive out of the box, and looks excellent on mobile devices.
• You get access to the entire Google Fonts catalog.
• The theme helps towards your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts.

In addition, TheFour (and all of GretaThemes offerings) are optimized for performance, so you get a fast loading website to boot. Finally, the theme also offers a lot of demo pages you can use to kickstart your designs quickly.

How to Translate Your TheFour-Powered Website Using Weglot (In 3 Steps)

In this section, we'll show you how to translate a website using Weglot. The process is pretty simple, and it remains the same no matter what theme you're using. Even so, some themes are more translation-ready than others, with TheFour being a great example. Let's get to work!

Step #1: Install the Weglot Plugin and Connect Your Account

Installing Weglot works similarly to most plugins. Simply install and activate the Weglot plugin on your WordPress website. You'll also need a Weglot account, which will give you access to your own dashboard on the platform to manage your translations.

Simply sign up, and once you're inside, copy your API key and save it for the next step.

Step #2: Configure the Translation Language for Your Content

Next, return to the WordPress dashboard and jump to the Weglot tab. You'll see a screen like the following:

Paste your Weglot API key within the corresponding field. Then, choose both an 'original' and a 'destination' language. As you may have guessed, your original language should match your site's existing one. However, your destination language will essentially be the one you translate into.

Once you're set, save your settings and let the plugin do its thing.

Step #3: Review Your Translations Using Your Weglot Dashboard

That’s it! If you head directly to your website, you should see the ‘language switcher’ in the bottom right-hand corner:

Weglot provides a first layer of automatic translations to help get you up and running quickly, and always have a translated version of your content. However, you can easily make some further tweaks and changes to your translations. To do so, return to your Weglot dashboard and go to the Translations section:

Here, you'll be able to review your content both in its original and destination language. More importantly, you can edit it by clicking on the relevant destination language translations. This lets you make almost any adjustments you’d like, and fix small elements of your content that literally get lost in translation.

Conclusion

Translating an entire website to another language is never easy. However, with the right plugin – such as Weglot – you can translate entire sites in minutes.

If you're using TheFour theme for your WordPress website, translating it is as simple as three steps:

1. Install the Weglot plugin and set up an account.
2. Configure which language you want to translate your content to.
3. Review your translations using the Weglot dashboard.

Do you have any questions about how to use Weglot to translate your WordPress website? Let's talk about them in the comments section below!

Image credit: Pixabay.