Polylang

What Is Polylang?

Polylang is a WordPress multilingual plugin that enables creating bilingual or multilingual websites with an intuitive interface. With over 700,000 active installations, Polylang is one of the most popular free translation solutions for WordPress, providing content translation, language switching, and URL management for multi-language sites.

Translation Management

Polylang adds a language selector to the post editor, allowing content to be created in multiple languages with linked translations. Each piece of content (post, page, custom post type) can have a translation in every configured language. The media library supports per-language descriptions and alternative text.

String Translations handle interface elements, widget titles, site title, tagline, and other text strings that exist outside of posts and pages. The string translation interface provides a centralized location for translating all non-content text.

URL Structure

Polylang supports multiple URL schemes for multilingual sites: language in directory (example.com/en/), language in subdomain (en.example.com), and different domains per language (example.com / example.fr). The chosen structure applies to all content types consistently.

Language Detection automatically redirects visitors to their preferred language based on browser settings, with options to set a default language for undetected preferences.

SEO Integration

Polylang generates proper hreflang tags linking translated versions of each page, enabling search engines to serve the correct language version to users. XML sitemaps include language annotations. The plugin integrates with Yoast SEO and Rank Math for per-language SEO settings.

WooCommerce Support

Polylang for WooCommerce (premium addon) extends translation capabilities to products, product categories, attributes, and WooCommerce pages. Customers browse and purchase in their preferred language with translated checkout and email notifications.

Polylang Pro

The premium version adds automatic translation through integration with DeepL and other machine translation services, duplicate content for translation starting points, and priority support.

Why Choose Polylang

WordPress site owners needing multilingual support with a straightforward interface and clean implementation choose Polylang. The free version provides complete translation management, and the integration with popular SEO plugins ensures multilingual sites maintain search engine visibility across all languages.