Weglot unveils a new technical feature for creating multilingual websites: the subdirectory (or sub-folder). Previously, Weglot only offered the possibility to translate your website through automatic translation with subdomains. Subdirectories are a favourite when it comes to SEO as all the SEO juice is channelled directly to your main domain rather than shared with a subdomain. And the good news is that it is now possible to translate your Webflow site, automatically with Weglot. Weglot will create a subdirectory for each translated page! We have integrated it into our Webflow site, so here is what you need to know.
Weglot unveils a new technical feature for creating multilingual websites: the subdirectory(or sub-folder). Previously, Weglot only offered the possibility to translate (SEO friendly) your website through translation with subdomains.
Small reminder of the difference subdomains vs. subdirectories.
- Subdomain: en.votresite.com
- Subdirectory: www.votresite.com/fr
Subdirectories are a favourite when it comes to SEO as all the SEO juice is channelled directly to your main domain rather than shared with a subdomain. And the good news is that it is now possible to translate your Webflow site, automatically with Weglot and that Weglot will create a subdirectory for each translated page! We have integrated it into our Webflow site, so here is what you need to know.
SEO optimised multilingual translation
Subdomain or subdirectory for an SEO optimised multi-lingual site? This question is hotly debated on forums and blogs. Here I will share some of my readings ...
But after reading this list (in part), subdirectories are in my opinion the best option for optimising the international seo of your multilingual site.
How is content translated with Weglot?
The content is automatically translated by Weglot. For each language. But you can customise this translation by using the manual translation function (modify words / terms / pages on your site). How do you do this? Manually from your Weglot account dashboard editor, without installing any plugin.
The perfect solution to translate your website?
Positive points:
- Simple and quick to set up
- Machine translation
- Optimised for SEO
- Many language choices
- Easily manage your custom translations from the dashboard
Negative points:
- The sitemap is not automatically generated with Webflow (there may be a plugin if you use Wordpress)
But... Google says that when a site is multilingual only one technical configuration is needed. Sitemap or ahref tag and Weglot automatically creates ahrefs tags. So your site is compliant with Google's expectations.
- Its price: the solution is quite expensive (translation of URLs from the paid plan at 2k$/year)
How to integrate it into your site?
If you use Webflow, you can do it without plugin thanks to the integration of a small piece of javascript code in the custom code of your Webflow project.
The step by step method (If you have not yet created your Weglot account, follow this tutorial first to implement Weglot in Webflow)
For the beta subdirectory, here are the instructions:
- First, go to https://dashboard.weglot.com/settings/setup/ and click on "Enable subdomains".
- You should get a new page with the current subdomain configuration. Here, you just need to add"&betasubdir=true" at the end of the URL (For example: https://(...)tegration=true&betasubdir=true)
- Then refresh the page and you should be able to choose between subdomains and subdirectories
- Select the subdirectories and follow the steps.
⚠️ Important: you will need to add two new entries in your domain's DNS, one of which is to create a CNAME field - www -. If you are using Webflow to host your site, this means you will need to remove the webflow proxy.ssl CNAME, as only one CNAME field is accepted by DNS hosts. We have done this, it does not cause any technical problems on our website.
Best practices for integrating Weglot subdirectory into your Webflow site
- Remove the hreflang tags from the custom code as they are automatically added by Weglot in the "subdirectory" version
- Do not activate the "auto-enable switch" feature of Weglot, as this causes crawling problems for Google. In addition, Google recommends that you leave the user free to choose and never force a redirection
- Configure a global canonical URL in the advanced settings of Weflow, it will be dynamically updated by Weglot
How do I check that my site is set up for multilingual seo?
Two tools can help you to ensure that the installation has been successful.
- Merkle hreflang Tags Testing Tool
- Weglot ahreflang checker
Here is a screenshot showing that your installation was successful, with green checks and proper language tagging on all subdirectories. If there is an error, the tool informs you with a red cross and an error message.
Conclusion
This new subdirectory feature works very well and is optimised for SEO. The content is automatically translated, but can also be edited manually from the Weglot interface. From a technical point of view Google's bots identify hreflang tags and canonical content well. This is a nice improvement of the website translation tool that Weglot offers, which you can test directly by clicking on the button with the flag on our site.
