How to Create a Multilingual Squarespace Website (Easy & SEO Friendly for 7.1 and 7.0!)
If you’re a Squarespace designer or user wanting to add multiple languages to your website, you’ve probably wondered the best way to go about it…
There are several ‘nearly there’ solutions hanging about on the internet but none of them seem to provide a robust way of translating your website so that it’s user friendly AND SEO friendly.
Watch this as Youtube video (or keep scrolling to read)
So what are the options available?
❌Create multiple Squarespace websites for different languages
For this solution, you’d need a separate website and therefore separate Squarespace plan and domain for each language you want to create.
Why this isn’t ideal:
This can get expensive as more languages = more Squarespace plans to pay
Managing multiple different websites can be overwhelming
You’d need to channel your marketing efforts to multiple different places
Duplicate content can cause issues with SEO
❌ Use different pages and sections of your site for different languages
Squarespace’s recommended solution of creating different language pages and listing them underneath the Language names, or by create a ‘landing page’ where people can choose a language, and create menus manually on those specific language pages.
Why this isn’t ideal:
The experience is awkward and not user friendly at all
You’d end up with tonnes of different pages and links to try and manage
Duplicate content can cause issues with SEO
❌ Add ‘google translate’ or auto translate plugin to your website
There are cheap ways to add a language picker and translated options to your website, such as Google Translate, or Bablic.
Why this isn’t ideal:
The translations are automatic and in most cases you have no control over them to edit them if you need to
There’s sometimes issues with loading
Google Translate in particular isn’t great for multilingual SEO as Google won’t index the translations
✅ The solution = Weglot! ✅
After lots of research, I recently came across a company called Weglot* who provide the best solution for adding multiple languages to a Squarespace website.
I recently used Weglot to create a bilingual site for a client (English and Welsh) and loved how easy it was to install, customise, and how great the support team were as well.
Below are the key benefits and reasons why I recommend this.
Easy install
Adding Weglot to your website is super quick and simple; you just need to set up a free account, fill in your website / language details, and add a snippet of code to the Settings > Advanced > Code Injection > Header area of your Squarespace website. I’d recommend using their ‘subdomain’ set up which is better for SEO, in which case you’ll also need to add a CNAME record to your domain, but that’s it!
Affordable pricing
Weglot gives you up to 2000 words in one language translated for free, but their paid plans* are really affordable too! Starting at around £10 a month for up to 10,000 words (which is plenty enough for a small 5-8 page website - depending on how much text you have of course!).
Auto Translations (that are editable!)
Weglot automatically translates the text on your website for you in over 100 different languages super quickly, but also loads each translation from anywhere on the page (including menus, buttons, text blocks, and even meta-data) into their dashboard so that you can go in and edit them to suit your needs if you’d like to.
SEO friendly
Using their ‘subdomain set up’ means that each language sits on its own subdomain and therefore gets indexed by Google in the correct language, without being counted as duplicate content, making it one of the best solutions for SEO.
Great support
With my experience I had a few queries about customisations as I was going along, and their Support team were super quick and friendly to respond!
Watch my video to see how it works:
Want to create your own multilingual site? Check out Weglot*.
Or get in touch if you’d like a professional Squarespace website design.
*Indicates an affiliate link, but I’m not sponsored to write this! I wanted to share this awesome tool because it’s great!
