Multilingual WordPress: Interview with Weglot

After our last chat with Logic Hop, we received an invitation to talk to Augustin Prot, Co-Founder of Weglot, a powerful WordPress translation plugin. 93digital regularly work on multilingual websites, so we were excited to hear more…

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Hi Augustin, thanks for sitting down with us! You’re the co-founder of Weglot, a WordPress multilingual plugin; can you tell us how it all started?

Thanks for having me! I co-founded Weglot in 2016 with my partner Remy at a small flat in Paris. Remy actually had the idea in his previous company when he had to make a multilingual website. He discovered how hard it was! So we decided to make a simpler solution and help business owners translate their websites – without having to always rely on developers. We thought translation should be easy and accessible, and we set out to build a product which solves that.

We’re now at fifteen people (and hiring!), and Weglot is used on 50,000+ websites. A lot of those are WordPress sites, but we also support Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, and other CMSes + static sites.

So how does Weglot work with WordPress?

Weglot has a WordPress plugin which integrates WordPress sites with our platform. You install the plugin like any other, add in your API key, and then you can get your WordPress site translated!

We provide a first layer of automatic translations to start with (you can get an expert human to check these), and there’s no code to edit, so it takes literally a couple of minutes to get a translated site up. The hardest decision you’ll need to make it which language(s) to translate to 😅

You can do the translation edits or order a professional translation on our website, and you can either use a front-end preview or go through a list of text strings. It’s all intuitive and nice and easy to use.

What are some of the benefits of having a multilingual website?

The key and obvious benefit is having a multilingual website lets you reach more people. Here are some stats: over three-quarters of internet users are communicating (and buying) in other languages besides English, and 90% of Europeans always visit a website in their own language when given a choice. A multilingual WordPress website will let you reach more people, and make more sales.

There are other benefits: with Weglot you can translate images as well as text so that you’re showing the most culturally appropriate content, and you can get better results in search by embracing multilingual SEO (which we also make easy).

The web makes it so easy to reach a huge audience, but businesses have historically found it difficult to grow beyond their native language. We want to help change that, and that’s what Weglot does.

How does it compare to similar plugins like WPML or Polylang for example?

Weglot’s goal is to make translating a website simple and easy. Saying that means two things:

There is the technical side of translation: How to take any website and make it multilingual. With Weglot, no coding required, no need to manually create each translated page, no maintenance problems. Plus, it works automatically with all WordPress themes and plugins.

There is the content side of multilingual: How to help website owners manage their translations on a daily basis. For that, Weglot first provides automatic translations. Then, it allows you to easily manage, edit or have professional translators check those translations.

These are our key competitive advantages, and why our customers use Weglot.

A lot of our customers have used translation plugins before and have had to put a lot of pain, time, and effort into these. With Weglot that’s not the case.

You can legitimately get set up with a fully-translated multilingual WordPress website with multiple languages, using Weglot, in under five minutes. We make translations easy, efficient, and pain-free.

Can you give me a little more about your different levels of subscription?

Sure! We have a free tier which gives you one translated language, and 2,000 translated words. We then have tiers from Starter to Corporate which add more translated languages on your site and more words! There’s also a 10-day free trial to get you started.

Thanks, Augustin! You can see more about Weglot’s WordPress translation plugin here and find out more about our Multilingual WordPress expertise here.