First of all, why translate your Squarespace website?
The main reason to make your Squarespace website multilingual is to reach new markets. English speakers make up just 53% of web users , which means there’s a total 47% of the people you’re currently not targeting: a lot of people (and businesses) you could be missing out on.
And if you were hoping potential customers would use the “translation page” in Chrome Browser, think again. No one is going to buy your service or product this way.
How often have you come across a branded website in a foreign language and not had the option to view it in your language? It’s an instant rebound.
There is end-user trust if they cannot understand the product or service they want to buy.
Improving the user experience equals great results
Choosing to speak to potential customers in their own language yields highly positive results.
Users from other markets will never find your site if it is not in their language. You are simply invisible. But, translate your website and you’ll soon see a SEO improvement.
Like Niel Patel, famous for his SEO blog, who translated his website into 82 languages and saw a 47% increase in traffic from his blog.
Of course, 82 languages is an extreme.
But take Weglot client ‘Jimmy Fairly’ as an example, who translated his website into 4 additional languages and saw a 70% increase in traffic and a 6x increase in international conversion.
“With our e-commerce store available in 4 languages, our international turnover has increased 10x since the integration of 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, neighboring countries also offer great growth prospects.
How do you create a multilingual website on Squarespace?
There are several ways to translate your Squarespace website, let’s take a look at the options.
1. Weglot: Squarespace’s Recommended Multilingual Extension
Weglot is Squarespace’s Recommended Multilingual Solution. Integrate it in minutes within your Squarespace dashboard and watch your site go live instantly.
Weglot has long been a Squarespace supporter 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 website content without any workarounds, complicated code injections, multiple websites/webpages, and additional translation costs.
p>One key The advantage is that there is no need for developers. Every 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’ll then have full editing control over those translations, allowing you to make manual edits, add teammates to make changes, or request professional translations directly within the Weglot Dashboard.
All of your newly translated pages on your site also follow SEO best practices and are automatically indexed by Google, giving you visibility in your new language.
Weglot translates your metadata, adds hreflang tags to let Google know there are different versions of that page, and creates a dedicated language URL for each new language.
Each part of the Weglot solution has been carefully designed to consider the many aspects of making your Squarespace website multilingual.
This includes translation of all metadata so you can share pages in specific languages, a visual editor to take into account any design considerations from text expansion, and various translation management tools.
You’ll also get a language toggle button automatically added to your interface whose layout can edit or duplicate one of Weglot’s pre-designed language buttons.
2. Squarespace translation solution for small websites
In addition to Weglot, Squarespace also has another option to translate your Squarespace website.
This option may make sense for a small website, such as a portfolio or website under 1000 words, and those who want to translate their site from scratch, without using a translation management interface.
First, you’ll need to decide how to translate your content, such as using a translation agency, yourself (if you speak the language), or manually running the content through a machine translation engine.
Next, you’ll need to create a front page as the opening of your website, so that in this first step, users can choose their preferred language.
Then, in your main navigation, you’ll add two folders named after each language, such as English and French. These will appear as dropdown menus on every page of your site for your users to change. You will need to duplicate all of your pages to create these translated versions.
3. Squarespace JavaScript Multilingual Solutions
JavaScript Multilingual Solutions allow you to translate your website simply by adding JavaScript code. This code will automatically detect (most of) your content and switch it to display the translations instead. It’s pretty simple to use and will display your translations without having to go through multiple Squarespace websites.
The main names you might have come across are:
- Bablic
- Localize
- Multilingualizer (which works a little differently)
With a JavaScript solution, you’ll see your translated content on your Squarespace site in one way easy to use, i.e. it is not added as a separate menu item, but as a multilingual version of your website, with a language selector and no need to add new pages.
Although there are several solutions to choose from, they all share the same drawbacks.
SEO Capabilities
The first The main drawback is the lack of multilingual SEO capabilities.
A multilingual JavaScript solution like Bablic or Localize works by detecting page content and dynamically changing it to translate it. But the content of the source code, which is what Google bots will scan, is not translated.
So what does that mean for your SEO? Your translated content will not be visible to search engines to crawl, which means there is no guarantee that it will be visible in searches in your translated languages.
All of your content will also exist in 1 URL, which is not preferable for SEO and means that in most cases it will only be SEO friendly in the original language of your site.
Loading problems
Sometimes there are also problems with loading pages of the site. These solutions don’t always work perfectly, so when switching between different languages there will be a flash of content, where the user will see both languages displayed for a brief moment.
Other issues arise when sharing translated pages on social media, which is unfortunately not possible as the metadata remains in the original language.
4. Multilingualizer
Multilingualizer is also a fairly popular multilingual JavaScript solution on Squarespace, but it works differently than Bablic or Localize. First, you’ll need to provide the translated content for your website yourself, which can be time consuming and expensive.
So, the way Multilingualizer works to make your Squarespace site multilingual is to add your translations directly within your page and hide content the visitor doesn’t want.
For example, you’ll create a page and add your content in both French and English. And if English is selected as the preferred language, French content will be hidden. This might seem like a good solution, but it also has some major drawbacks.
SEO Capabilities
As explained above, Google bots work by scanning your website source code for indexing. With Multilingualizer, Google will scan your content in French and English at the same time without separating the two! So you will end up with pages indexed in Google with titles in French and English. Which is not the best for SEO.
Unable to translate apps or integrations
There are also some drawbacks in the way those translations are displayed. Multilingualizer cannot translate any content that does not come from your Squarespace pages. For example, content that comes from an external source, such as a review plugin, means that customer reviews displayed on your website will remain in their original language.
And, if you have a Squarespace eCommerce site, your checkout can’t be translated, which takes away any user-friendliness you’d hoped to create with a multilingual website, especially from a customer standpoint. electronic commerce. In addition to your payment, all automated emails sent from your website will remain in the original language of the site.
5.Squarespace Multilingual CSS Solution
Search Google for “Squarespace multilingual solutions” and you’ll come across a number of developers offering free CSS coding solutions to allow you to do this, without having to have multiple websites or a selection. of translated pages.
But, like all free solutions, they come with numerous problems.
First, you’ll absolutely need a developer’s input to help you implement this multilingual solution from Squarespace.
These are messy, problematic solutions that require a number of “workarounds” to ensure they actually work.
Such problems include problems with the usability of the mobile version. And some users report seeing all visible parts of the website navigation while pages load in the correct language (definitely not good for site speed either).
Many of the solutions are also specific to certain Squarespace templates; in other words, they haven’t been tested on other templates, so you might run into problems here as well.
You’ll also have to use some custom code to adapt the language switcher to suit your needs. layout and more code depending on where you want to place it on your Squarespace multilingual site.
CSS solutions also don’t translate your website content, you’ll have to fix that yourself. This is simply a solution to display the content.
As always, those solutions are not SEO friendly, so don’t expect your newly translated multilingual Squarespace site to show up on Google.
How do you create a multilingual website in Squarespace?
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to add Weglot, Squarespace’s recommended translation solution, to your site.
This integration is only available on Squarespace 7.1. If you’re using version 7.0 or 5, use our general integration.
Summary
We show you a number of solutions to choose from when deciding to make your website Squarespace is multilingual. In short:
- Squarespace Official Solution – Workaround: Both languages are visible at all times in the menu bar, no SEO
- Javascript – Can be displayed without multiple sites – Poor multilingual SEO capabilities
- CSS – Messy solution that needs developer input and has no content capabilities SEO
- Google Translate Button – Cheap, fast but no translation and localization control – no SEO
- Weglot – Weglot offers quick and easy installation, no duplicate sites, multilingual SEO features, and no developer required
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