What is the best url structure for a multi-language website?

Home Forums WordPress Plugins Language Switcher What is the best url structure for a multi-language website?

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    • #7649
      Rafasashi
      Keymaster

      This decision is for you to make depending on your environment, how big is the website, how you will maintain it and also perhaps on your SEO strategy.

      1 – separated implementations

      • fr.mydomain.net, en.mydomain.net
      • mydomain.us, mydomain.es, mydomain.fr
      • mydomain.net/fr/, mydomain.net/en/

      Pros: separated databases, dedicated home page, dedicated settings per language
      Cons : not centralized, multi website maintenance, some duplicated settings

      Recommend for large website with multiple people involved or woocommerce implementation.

      2 – single implementation

      • mydomain.net/en/page-title/, mydomain.net/fr/titre-de-page/
      • mydomain.net/category/en/category-title/, mydomain.net/category/fr/titre-de-categorie/

      In the page structure you could create a parent page for each language, mydomain.net/en/, mydomain.net/es/ and use them as parent of the translated version for example.

      In the category structure you could create a parent category for each language mydomain.net/category/en/, mydomain.net/category/fr/ and use them as parent category for the translated category. You can also replace the folder “category” by something more generic like “c” or “cat” in your permalink settings, this is up to you.

      Pros: centralized databases, fast implementation of a translated page, manageable by one person, easy to make changes across a group of translated contents because the plugin can synchronize the changes that belong to the same installation.
      Cons : less flexibility in terms of settings and url structure, all languages are mixed under the same domain, all languages share the same post types and taxonomies.
      Recommend for small website or when you only need to translate the content section but you keep the same global settings.

      Once you have decided the structure that best suits your project the rest is manual setting up of the language urls per item. It is not automatically implemented and the languages are not dynamically set or changed in the urls. You need to create each posts first, and then add their urls into their sibling settings regardless the structure you decide to follow.

      • This topic was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Rafasashi.
      • This topic was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Rafasashi.
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