Tips for Localizing Your Wordpress Website: Challenges & Solutions

When your manager tells you that your company is interested in localizing its website, you might feel overwhelmed, especially when it's hosted on Wordpress. Despite the rise of other strong headless CMSs, Wordpress is evolving to meet modern needs and sticking around. It is used by hundreds of thousands of companies and has millions of adherents. However, localizing a Wordpress site comes with challenges like developer turnover, outdated themes, and plugin conflicts.

To help you succeed in localizing your Wordpress site, here are some tips that can make the process easier and smoother:

1. Identify the developers who maintain the site and get their support. It is a team effort and their help will be essential.
2. Ask if there are any performance problems or plans to revamp the site. Make sure that the site's theme and underlying architecture are optimized.
3. Determine how localizing the site might impact the structure of the text fields and blocks that make up the webpages.
4. Figure out the rate at which content is being produced or updated and who has the publishing schedule.
5. Create a comprehensive list of pages and posts that need to be translated and other page elements like shortcodes, snippets, forms, etc.
6. Check if your Wordpress site is internationalized.
7. Look at plugin options like WPML and Polylang, and test them thoroughly.
8. Stress test the plugin at the beginning to uncover gaps as early as possible.
9. Determine the file format that data will be exported to.
10. Ask your LSP to pseudo translate files as part of a test project.
11. Designate a Wordpress developer to be responsible for plugin maintenance and operation.
12. Determine the process for online QA using preview links or other tools.
13. Confirm communication protocols with your LSP via Slack, Teams, etc. Plan for regular communication.
14. Sign up for the plugin's premium technical support for direct access to developers and quick troubleshooting.
15. Set up periodic team meetings to touch base. Document everything.

By following these tips, you can ensure that your Wordpress site is optimized for localization and that the process is smoother, less time-consuming, and more efficient. And if all goes well, hopefully there will be no copy and paste!