First, why should you translate your Squarespace site?
The main reason for making your Squarespace site multilingual is to reach new markets. English speakers make up only 53% of web users — which means that there’s a whole number47% of people you’re not currently reaching out – that’s a lot of people (and companies) you might be missing out on.
And if you were hoping prospects would use the “translation page” in the Chrome browser, think again. Nobody will buy your service or product this way.
Reading: How to create a bilingual website on squarespace
How many times have you come across a brand website in a foreign language and not had the opportunity to view it in your language? It’s an instant jump.
There is no confidence for the end user if they don’t understand the product or service they are trying to buy can.
Improved user experience leads to great results
Choosing to speak to prospects in their own language leads to extremely positive results.
Users in other markets will never come across your website if it is not in their language. You are just invisible. But if you translate your website, you will soon see a improvement in SEO.
Like Niel Patel – famous for SEO blogs – who translated his website into 82 languages and saw a 47% increase in traffic to his blog.
Of course 82 languages is an extreme.
But take Weglot client ‘Jimmy Fairly’ who translated his website into 4 more languages and one saw 70% more traffic and a 6x increase in international conversion.
“With our e-commerce store available in 4 languages, our international sales have increased 10-fold since we integrated Weglot.”
Clara Champion, Director of Digital and E-Commerce, Jimmy Fairly
Expanding into new markets doesn’t just have to mean going much further afield, too Neighboring countries offer great growth prospects.
How do you create a multilingual website on Squarespace?
There are a number of ways to translate your Squarespace website, let’s take a look at those Options .
1. Weglot: Squarespace Recommended Multilingual Extension
Weglot is Squarespace’s recommended multilingual solution. Integrate it into your Squarespace dashboard in minutes and see your site go live instantly.
Weglot has long been compatible with Squarespace, and in 2022 we joined Squarespace Extensions, enabling thousands of Squarespace users to achieve multilingual capabilities with even easier integration.
The Weglot Extension detects, translates, and displays your Squarespace site’s content without workarounds, complicated code injections, multiple sites/web pages, and additional translation costs.
One key benefit is that no developers are needed. Any part of your website can be translated, including your checkout (if you have one).
With Weglot, you get a first layer of machine translation from leading neural machine translation providers including DeepL, Google Translate and Microsoft. You then have full editing control over these translations, allowing you to make manual edits, add teammates to make edits, or order professional translations directly from the Weglot dashboard.
All your newly translated website pages will also follow SEO best practices and will be automatically indexed on Google, making you visible in your new language.
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Weglot translates your metadata, adds hreflang tags to tell Google that there are different versions of this page, and creates a dedicated language URL for each new language.
Each part of the Weglot solution has been carefully designed to accommodate the many aspects of your Squarespace site’s multilingualism.
This includes translation of all metadata so you can release pages in specific languages, a visual editor to accommodate design considerations from text expansion, and multiple translation management tools.
You will also automatically get a language toggle button added to your frontend, which you can edit the design of or duplicate one of Weglot’s pre-made language buttons.
2. Squarespace Translation Solution for Small Sites
In addition to Weglot, Squarespace also offers another option for translating your Squarespace site.
This option can be useful for a small website like a portfolio or a website under 1,000 words, and for those who want to translate their website from scratch without using a translation management interface.
First you need to decide how you want to translate your content, e.g. B. by using a translation agency yourself (if you speak the language) or by manually running the content through a machine translation engine.
Then you need to create a cover page to introduce your website so that users can select their preferred language in this first step.
Then in your main navigation add two folders with the name of each language e.g. B. English and French. These appear on every page of your website as drop-down menus that your users can switch between. You must duplicate all of your pages to create these translated versions.
3. Squarespace Multilingual JavaScript Solutions
Multilingual JavaScript solutions allow you to translate your website simply by adding JavaScript code. This code will automatically detect (most of) your content and change it to show translations instead. It’s easy to use and will display your translations without having to decide between multiple Squarespace sites.
The main names you may have come across are:
- Bablic
- Localize
- Multilingualizer (which works a little differently)
With a JavaScript solution, your translated content will be on your Squarespace website appears user-friendly – meaning it’s not added as a separate menu item, but as a multilingual version of your site, with language switcher and no need to add new pages.
Although there are a number of solutions to choose from, they all have the same disadvantages.
SEO features
The first The main disadvantage is the lack of multilingual SEO features.
A multilingual JavaScript solution like Bablic or Localize recognizes the content of the page and dynamically changes it for translations. But the content in the source code that Google bots scan is not translated.
So what does this mean for your SEO? Your translated content is not visible to search engines for crawling, which means there is no guarantee that you will be visible to searches in your translated languages.
Your content will also all be under 1 URL, which is not desirable for SEO and means that in most cases you are only SEO friendly in the original language of your website.
Trouble Loading
Sometimes there are problems loading website pages as well. These solutions don’t always work smoothly, so switching between different languages results in a content flash where the user sees both languages for a brief moment.
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Other problems arise when sharing translated pages on social media, which unfortunately is not possible as the metadata remains in the original language.
4. Multilingualizer
Multilingualizer is another JavaScript multilingual solution that’s very popular at Squarespace, but it works differently than Bablic or Localize. First, you have to provide your website’s translated content yourself, which can be both time-consuming and expensive.
Then Multilingualizer works to make your Squarespace site multilingual by adding your translations right on your page and hiding the content the visitor doesn’t want.
For example, create a page and add your content in both French and English. And if English is selected as the preferred language, the French content will be hidden. This seems like a good solution, but it also comes with some major drawbacks.
SEO Features
As mentioned, Google bots scan your Website source code to index it. With Multilingualizer, Google scans your French and English content at the same time without separating the two! So you get pages indexed on Google with both French and English titles. It’s not the best for SEO.
It’s impossible to translate apps or integrations
There are also some downsides to how these translations are displayed. Multilingualizer can’t translate content that doesn’t come from your Squarespace pages. Content that comes from an external source, such as B. a rating plug-in, mean that all customer ratings displayed on your website remain in their original language.
And if you have an ecommerce squarespace website, your checkout can’t be translated, thus losing all the usability aspects that you wanted to create with a multilingual website – especially from an ecommerce perspective . Along with your checkout, any automated emails sent from your site will remain in your original site language.
5.Squarespace Multilingual CSS Solution
Search Google for “Squarespace Multilingual Solutions” and you’ll come across a number of developers offering free CSS code solutions so you can do this – without having multiple websites or a choice of translated pages.
But like all free solutions, there are numerous problems.
First, you absolutely need the input of a developer to help you implement this multilingual Squarespace solution.
These are problematic, messy solutions that require a series of “workarounds” to ensure they actually work.
These issues include usability issues with the mobile version. And some users report that they see all visible parts of the site navigation while loading pages in the correct language (also definitely not good for site speed).
Many of the solutions are also specific to certain Squarespace templates – in other words, they haven’t been tested with other templates – so you might run into problems here too.
You’re also need to use custom code to adapt the language switcher to your design needs, and more code depending on where you want to place it on your Squarespace multilingual site.
CSS solutions don’t translate your website content either, you have to arrange that yourself. This is simply a workaround to view the content.
As always, these solutions are not SEO compatible, so don’t expect your newly translated Squarespace multilingual site to show up on Google.
How do you create a multilingual site on Squarespace?
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to add Squarespace’s endorsed translation solution, Weglot, to your site.
This integration is only available on Squarespace 7.1. If you are using version 7.0 or 5, use our generic integration.
Summary
We have shown you a number of solutions to choose from decide to make your Squarespace site multilingual. In summary:
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- Official Squarespace solution – A workaround – with both languages visible in the menu bar at all times – no SEO
- Javascript – Can be viewed without multiple websites – Low multilingual SEO features
- CSS – Messy solution requiring developer input and no SEO features
- Google Translate button – Cheap, fast, but no localization and translation control – no SEO
- Weglot – Weglot offers a quick, easy installation , no duplicate websites , multilingual SEO features and no need for developers
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