The Scientific Method for Building a WordPress Multilingual Website_Plugins Are Not the Best Choice

Foreign trade enterprise usersBuilding a Websiteoften consider multilingual websites. The vast majority of multilingual websites are created usingtranslation plugins, such as WPML,Polylang, etc. However, this approachis not user-friendly for website operations，build a multilingual website. What is a more scientific method? Let Naiba analyze it for you.

Why Multilingual Plugins Are Not User-Friendly for Operations

Previously, Naibabiji sharedWordPress Multilingual Plugin Polylang Tutorial_Foreign Trade Multilingual Website Buildingan article like this. Indeed,using multilingual plugins like Polylang can instantly turn your website into a multilingual version, and it supports integration with machine translation to reduce translation costs. However,multilingual websites created using such plugins have the following drawbacks:

1. Machine translation is not accurate;
2. It cannot achieve 100% translation of the entire website content, such as text in images or hard-coded data in webpage code;
3. The server is fixed in one location, resulting in suboptimal access speeds for users in other countries;
4. Too much translated content can burden the database and affect website speed.

Why these drawbacks exist will be explained in the following analysis of scientific multilingual website building.

Scientific Methods for Building Multilingual Websites

Using the case in the screenshot above, Naiba will analyze for everyone,which method is the scientific way to build multilingual websites。 A more scientific method for building multilingual websites is，to create a separate website for each language, the data and database of each language website are independently separated.. Let's analyze why this approach is more scientific than using multilingual plugins for translation.

Advantages of Independently Building Multilingual Websites

Using independent sites to build multilingual websites offers several functions that translation plugins cannot achieve.

1. Each language website operates independently

How to understand this independent operation? For example, with a China site and a US site, during China's Double Eleven, your website homepage slideshow will definitely feature Double Eleven promotional offers, while the US generally has Black Friday as the shopping festival. So if you have independent sites, you can separately launch shopping promotions on each website during their respective events. You might say this doesn't matter, wouldn't running promotions on both sides sell more? Well then, how do you handle your website SEO? Which language do you optimize for? Naiba shares from experience, don't hesitate, just build them separately.

2. Optional website server location

If you use a multilingual plugin to translate your website, there is one issue: the server can only be placed in either the US or China, so users from one country will always experience slow access to your site. With independent multilingual websites, you can place the English site on a US server and the Chinese site on a domestic server. You might say, I can useCDN acceleration, but then you'll encounter a new problem: currently, there is no CDN service provider that is exceptionally fast for both domestic and international access.

3. Workload is similar to plugin translation, with a smaller database

Following the example in the screenshot above, creating websites in 6 languages, with all article data multiplied by 6, and 6 independent databases, definitely affects performance differently. Moreover, if products are involved, it also relates to search; high search volume puts significant pressure on the website database.Why is the workload said to be the same as with plugin translation?The workflow of translation plugins is: for one article, if you want to translate it into several languages, you need to separately create articles in those languages, which is the same workload as publishing corresponding articles on each website. In fact, directly publishing articles in WordPress is even quicker than using translation plugins.

How to Build Independent Multilingual Websites

Still using the example from the QQ chat screenshot above, if you need to establish 6 independent websites at once, each requiring the upload of over 100 products, it can indeed be tedious. However, there is a convenient method: backing up the website data and importing it into a new website:

1. Back up the entire website with uploaded products (Website Backup Tutorial);
2. Upload the backup to a new server and restore it;
3. Modify the restored database's domain name to match the domain bound to the corresponding language website;
4. In the website backend, modify product titles and descriptions to the corresponding language.

This process saves the step of uploading products, avoiding the tedious task of uploading product images one by one. If you want to build a multilingual website this way, it is recommended to use Vultr servers, for reasons referenced in the article below:

• Multi-Datacenter Cross-Border Foreign Trade VPS Server Recommendation_Vultr_Complete Purchase and Usage Tutorial

Using Vultr, you can also utilize their snapshot service to quickly create VPS servers with identical data. In simpler terms, it'slike installing a ghost system in the past(maybe you haven't heard of it), you have one file, Vultr has a copier (snapshot function), you can directly make 5 copies of the file and distribute these 5 copies to different people (data centers). Isn't that much more convenient? The server is created, the website environment is set up, the website is built, uploaded product data and published articles are all there; you only need to modify the website domain address and change the text to the corresponding language.