Building a Multilingual Website

Opening a site to a second language widens your audience — but every page now exists twice, needing to be written, updated and indexed separately. The structural choice you make at the start decides how hard everything after it will be.

The goal: an architecture that is clear for Google and for your editors alike.

01 — URL structure

Three options, one recommendation

02 — Hreflang tags

Telling Google which version is for whom

Each page declares its equivalents in other languages, plus an "x-default" version. Set up poorly, they do nothing useful; set up correctly, they prevent the wrong language from showing up in search results.

03 — Translating

Neither raw machine translation, nor duplication

• Human-reviewed translation for important pages.
• Adaptation, not a literal copy: headlines, examples, units, currencies.
• One language per URL; never two languages mixed on the same page.

04 — Maintenance

The real cost

Every new page, every update, every blog post needs a counterpart. Plan the editorial budget before announcing the second language — a half-translated site makes a poor impression.

05 — Frequently asked questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Subfolder or subdomain?

A subfolder in most cases: simpler, and SEO authority stays concentrated on a single domain.

Is machine translation enough?

For a first draft, yes, but key pages need to be reviewed by a human. A shaky translation hurts credibility.

Do I need to translate the whole site?

No. Start with the pages that serve your target audience, then expand based on actual demand.

06 — Resources & links

Where to go, concretely