Translating your rentals website created with WpRentals theme in other languages is no longer a ‘nice to have’, it’s now a ‘must-have’ if you’re hoping to do business in new countries. But what about when the people in the very market you’re targeting speak more than one language?
This is the case for dozens of countries around the world. Take Indian, Switzerland, Belgium, and even the US where you might be surprised to learn it’s the second-largest Spanish-speaking country, following only Mexico.
But, it’s not just countries where there’s more than one official language you might want to take into consideration. What about cosmopolitan cities like New York, Amsterdam, and Paris where thousands of ex-pats live. This consideration becomes even more relevant for those within real estate – where your clientele can be international.
And, even more so when you’re renting short-term holiday rentals. Another industry where you’ll need to think beyond the language spoken in the country. After all, 5 out of the 9 countries listed as spending the most money on international tourism are non-English speaking.
So, for that very reason, we’ll give a quick tour about how to translate one of WPEstate’s popular themes – WP Rentals. Let’s get started!
Why translate your WordPress website?
There are a number of other reasons why you’ll want to translate your WordPress website that go further than just allowing users to view your website in their preferred language.
Grow your reach
As we mentioned in the introduction, translating your website will allow you to speak to new audiences around the world, or even those within your current markets.
Surprisingly only 25% of internet users actually speak English. No matter what industry you’re working in, translating the content of your website will allow you to reach new markets, effortlessly.
Increase in sales and revenue
If your website visitors can now understand the words on your website then they’re much more likely to convert.
A reduction in bounce rate means you’ll likely see an impact on your conversion rate as your potential customers can now understand your website.
Personalization
Presenting your services, goods, and products in the native language of your customers is not only smart from a commercial point of view but also from a personal standpoint.
If you translate your website, you show to your potential customers that you value them and you’re invested in the user experience.
Competitive advantage
Stay ahead of your competition by offering a website in multiple languages. Like all businesses it’s likely you have several key competitors you’re up against.
A translated website is one way of ensuring you’re ahead of the competition and a smart opportunity to take advantage of.
Multilingual SEO
A further benefit of website translation is the improvements to your SEO. Potential customers will be searching in their native language so it would be difficult for your website to appear in their searches if it’s not translated.
Now let’s take a look at just how easier it is to go multilingual using WordPress multilingual plugin, Weglot. At this point it’s important to mention that no matter what theme you’re using, Weglot is compatible with them all!
Installing Weglot on your WP Rental theme
Step 1
Go to your WordPress dashboard > ‘Plugins tab’ > ‘Add New’ and search for Weglot.
Click install, then after a few seconds, click the activate button.
You’ll now see a Weglot tab has appeared within your WordPress dashboard. Click on the Weglot tab to finalize your configuration.
Step 2
Here, you’ll select the languages you want to translate your website into.
First, enter your unique API key—available on your Weglot Dashboard (you’ll need to create an account to get access to this).
Then select the current language of your site and then add the new languages you want to translate it into. Click ‘Save Changes’.
Step 3
And, that’s it! Head on over to your website and you’ll see it’s fully translated, using a first layer of machine translation. You’ll notice Weglot has gone ahead and added a language switcher to the bottom right of your website. Simply go to your Weglot tab in your WordPress dashboard and customize your language switcher to match the design of your site.
You can also choose to automatically redirect your visitors by their browser language, you can do so by making sure that “auto-switch” is turned on in your ‘Settings’ tab within the Weglot Dashboard.
Editing your translations
As mentioned, Weglot gives you a first layer of machine translation. You can choose to leave those translations as they are or manually edit them to meet your translation requirements. Making changes is simple. Just got to your Weglot Dashboard, then your Translations List and click into the translation you’d like to edit. Once changed, it’s automatically saved!
For those that would like a professional translator to make edits, you make an order through the Weglot Dashboard. Or if you’d like to add teammates to your project to help out with any translations, that’s also possible.
The screenshot above is just one way to edit your translations with Weglot. We’ve shown you the ‘Translations List’ view, but for those of you who prefer a more visual approach, you can switch to the ‘Visual Editor’ view which takes you to a live preview of your website.
Simply click on the blue pencil icon next to any of the highlighted text to make a change. A box will then appear and you can make your change, then click OK to save it. This change will instantly appear on your live website.
It’s not just the text on your website that Weglot automatically detects and translates. Even the text you can’t see like your metadata will be translated into your new target language. You can easily find this by filtering in your translations list ‘meta’.
And, on top of that multilingual SEO friendly feature, Weglot also adds href lang tags and displays your content under language subdirectories – two fundamentals of getting your pages ranked in search engines for your new languages.
Translating media files
In addition to translating the content of your WP Rentals theme, Weglot also allows you to translate media files, such as images, videos, and PDFs to give you a fully localized website.
To translate an image go into your translations list. At the bottom, you’ll see ‘Add media translation’.
Once you’ve clicked on it a box will appear asking you to add the original image file URL and the image file you’d like to replace it with. Once you’ve clicked ‘add’ the image file will be added to your translations list and updated on your front website.
The same process can be repeated for any image, video, or PDF you’d like to replace across your website.
Check out Weglot and WP Rental in action! Started translating your website today – try Weglot’s 10-day free trial so you can explore the platform and get access to all the features of a paid plan. `
For those with websites under 2,000 words and wanting to add 1 additional language you can continue using Weglot for free. Paid plans that start from just €9.90 a month depending on the number of languages and words on your site.
