6 Essential Features of a Well-Designed Multilingual Website
A multilingual website has become increasingly necessary when reaching audiences from diverse demographics. After all, most online users prefer to consume content in their own language, and English-language messages reach only 16% of the world.
Building a multilingual website is more complex than translating your content from one language into another. It is crucial to approach with a focus on localization and user experience to ensure success.
This guide can help you get started. Let’s focus on six essential features your online presence needs to appeal to audiences in multiple languages.
1. A Prominent Language Switcher
First, and perhaps most importantly, any multilingual site should make it easy for users to consume the content in their language of choice. Even if they land on the English or default site, they should easily find an option to switch languages, regardless of which page they land on.
That means designing a prominent and intuitive language selector or switcher. Most of your audience will likely look at the website's header first, close to the site's search function. However, there are also other possibilities to consider. Placing the language switcher in the navigation, for example, ensures that your audience becomes aware of it anytime they want to move to a new page. Similarly, placing it in the footer gives the language switcher a permanent place without becoming too intrusive for users who have already found their language.
2. Visual and Textual Redundancies
Speaking of your language selector, do not assume that simply using the country flag of each language you offer is enough to let your users know which options they have. Instead, create visual and textual references to the available languages on the site, ensuring enough redundancy to avoid confusion for all users.
Remember: flags are symbols for countries, not languages. Using the flag of Spain for the Spanish version of your site could alienate Spanish speakers from Latin America, just as using the U.S. flag for English could confuse visitors from the U.K., Australia, or India.
Instead, mention your language options in plain text, using the language in question's native word for itself. You can also use flags as a secondary shortcut, but never in a way that might overpower the words you use to describe the languages your site offers.
3. Consistency in Layout and Design
In web design at any level, consistency is essential. The same is naturally true when designing your website in ways that appeal to users who prefer different languages.
You cannot assume that your multilingual audience segments are naturally subdivided. Instead, you may have a portion of your audience that seamlessly switches back between languages, like German to Dutch, English to Spanish, and so on. That audience expects and demands consistency across your site, regardless of the language they use at a given time. For this reason, avoid moving elements of the site or within an individual piece around purely because the language is different. The sitemap, layout structure, and overall design should all remain similar regardless of the language. Instead of two separate websites, you need one that simply accommodates users from different locations who prefer other languages.
4. Localized Visuals
While consistency matters, it can also quickly be taken too far—to the point where it can harm the experience of multilingual visitors. Localization is critical for your multilingual website. Aligning your translated content and your website's visuals with your audience's cultural background is vital. That means closely examining all the images and graphics you use on the different linguistic versions of your website. Ensure that visitors in specific languages or regions can see themselves in the photos you post representing your customers or target audience.
In addition to adjusting your visuals, consider shifting some featured content on your website's key landing pages. If, for instance, you feature a few products on your homepage, those products (and the images representing them) may change depending on where on the globe a visitor views them from.
5. Reference Adjustments
It is important not to underestimate the potential search engine optimization power of a multilingual website. If, for example, you want to unlock the French eCommerce market for your products, offering a French version of your site goes a long way toward ensuring that your content ranks more prominently on the country's leading search engines.
But once again, the text is one of many pieces that need to change to accomplish that feat. Google, for instance, places a significant emphasis on external links to estimate the credibility and helpfulness of the websites it ranks. At the same time, the credibility of the sites you link changes depending on the language and country your users are in. That means combing through your content and ensuring that any external links you have are relevant to the language in which the content is written. The more localized your SEO linking strategy, the better.
6. A Strategic URL Structure
What URLs should the versions of your website that exist in different languages have? As it turns out, there is more than a single answer. Most commonly, you will find one of three structures across the web:
Country-code top-level domains: For example, Amazon.com, the main domain in the United States, changes to Amazon.de for the online marketplace's German version.
Subdomains and additions to your domain name depending on the language: For example, Wikipedia changes from en.wikipedia.org for English users to de.wikipedia.org for their German counterparts.
Subdirectories, i.e., individual folders for each language your website exists in that don't go to the domain level: Think ikea.com/de vs. ikea.com/en for German and English speakers, respectively.
Each option has benefits, such as top-level domains "feeling" more native to your audience and having a potentially more significant SEO impact or subdirectories being more straightforward and cost-effective to deploy. According to the 2023 Web Globalization Report Card, even the world's biggest websites tend to be split evenly between these options. The key is not choosing one by default but finding the right choice that matches your strategic needs and capabilities.
Building Multilingual Websites That Your Audiences Will Love
Creating a multilingual website is often essential for global business success. But you can only leverage its full benefits if you build it correctly—which is where the above features come in.