The difficulties of a multilingual website or blog

Building a multilingual website might not be a problem, especially if you are bilingual or speak several languages and can do the translation yourself.

The positives

Having a multilingual website is great: you can reach out to more people, build trust, expand into new markets and eventually get more sales.

Difficulties

However, writing blog posts in different languages in order to create value for your visitors and to improve your SEO can be tiring.

First, you have to find the right multilingual plugin for your WordPress website and have to get grips with it. Alternatively, you have to find a web developer who is familiar with multilingual websites. This might seem to be a simple exercise, but in reality, it’s out of scope for many developers.

Then you have to create content in different languages. Writing posts in different languages can be time-consuming, especially if you are writing about a specific subject where terminology is required. It needs time for investigation, spell checks and the post has to be uploaded in all the languages you have your website built in.

Perhaps a less known aspect of multilingual blogging is that the content you share in different languages might not resonate with the same audience in the different countries. And that’s because of how the human brain and languages work.

Be honest to yourself

Therefore, before jumping into a multilingual website or blog, ask yourself who your real target audience is. If your website is in English, do you really need another language?