Hi everyone. How to create a multi-language blog using Webflow CMS? It looks like there is only one CMS Collection Page" for “post”. What is the best way to do it?
Thanks a lot.
There is No simple Way for now. (Vote for the wishlist idea her).
For a massive multi-language blog (Or more than 2 languages) - maybe use another CMS.
For small 2 languages blog - manually create this idea (collection - blog-en and blog-fr) - or duplicate fields on the same collection (description fr. Description En) and add extra feild “page language”) - select menu (like this you filter the lists by language). Very Tidy but will work fine.
prefix trick
Give numbers (#id) for each article example:
1-Hello World and 1-Bonjour tout le monde - otherwise its really hard over time to compare articles). Add extra field for the “title” (same as “name” without #id)==> (Do not use name) + Remember to remove the number from the slug.
Copy collection page
No way (To create A and than duplicate to B).
So, Finish 100% design/layout before you bind all fields (Otherwise no way do to copy-and-paste from en to fr collection). Its even good idea to create “non-cms” copy of this page (and disable this page from google index).
Styling over time: Do not add extra classes or combo-classes to B or A (use same base styles).
Sum:
This is the “stupid solution” -
Duplicate collection - or - same collection duplicate posts.
You find clever ideas under the forum - but in the bottom line "no fast solution" for now.
4 Likes
Thank you very much for your detailed tips.
But sad to hear that, we are building a large scale blog magazine on webflow… webflow should put some effort on supporting multi-lingual site.
I just find this WEGLOT ( How Weglot Works - Weglot )
Any idea if is a good solution?
2 Likes
Hi Anthony,
Eugene from the Weglot team. Obviously I’m biased but yes it’s a good solution! Weglot automatically detects all your content and replace it with your desired translations. It’s simple to integrate, you then only focus on your translations and best of all, it’s fully SEO complaint if you use our “subdomain integration”.
We have setup a guide on how to install Weglot on a Webflow website + made a demo here:
Check it out and if you have any questions, please let me know or contact directly our support team here: support@weglot.com
Best,
Eugene
2 Likes
How does subdomain integration work? Does the main website need to be manually duplicated, on two parallel webflow websites? Or does it take the source content, and create the translated page dynamically?
Hi,
Weglot handles pretty much everything, you just need to link the Weglot subdomains in your DNS zone. The API generates new pages from the source content that you only need to translate into Weglot. So yeah it’s created dynamically.
I’m about to use their API in a few days/weeks. I’ll deliver more in-depth details when able.
Hi @AlphaBlock,
You don’t need to duplicate anything. Weglot will dynamically create a translated version of your website and deliver it through our reverse proxy server 
@ColibriMedia Thank you for your answer! Let me know if you have any questions when you test Weglot out.
Thank you - that sounds exactly like what we need.
To be extremely clear, I will have the english version living on say, en.site.com, and will create an empty es.site.com, which weglot will magically fill in. I literally do all the webflow design on en.site.com - and simply take care that es.site.com is ok from DNS stand-point, and weglot will do the rest.
Google will think there’s a website on es.site.com, and will index it, SEO it, etc.
Tell me please it works like this
Thanks!
@eugene_weglot Is the wrongly named language slug fixed? “Traditional Chinese” is not “tw”, tw Is commonly refers to Taiwan only.
You create your original website on Webflow as usual. Connect it to your domain name site.com via your DNS and then also connect Weglot via your DNS on es.site.com, fr.site.com … (Everything is explained when you sign up to help you do it). Weglot will then detect your all your website content (text, images, …), allow you to translate it and display the translations
Weglot also follows all Google best practices in terms of multilingual SEO: It adds hreflangs, allow you to translate all metadata, … so the translated versions of your site are all well indexed.
Hi @anthonychan2509, not it’s not fixed yet unfortunately. I’ll let you know when it’s done.
Hi Eugene,
What about CMS Collections? For example I have lots of CMS collections serving as predefined list of parameters for my core collection. For example: I develop a watches & jewellery website where the watches have lots of features, like case shapes, dial colours, complications and etc. Do I have to translate manually each main collection item details (which I mostly selected by dropdown list) as soon they created, or it is enough to translate “nested collections items” only once, and they will be automatically translated once I create an item within core collection and fill it with options in english language pulled from “nested” collections. Hope that makes sense a bit…
Thank you in advance,
Elchin
Hey @Flex_Design,
I’m not sure I fully understood your question but let me try to answer it. First: The way Weglot works is it scans your original page, detects the content (mainly the strings) visible on the page and replaces this content with translations (that you control). So you create your Webflow website in one language as usual and once Weglot is integrated, only the content that is on your Front website will be detected and translatable.
Also, you don’t need to translate the same string twice. For example: if you have different color options for the watchband of many watches like “Brown” / “Black” / “Red”, those separate strings will only need to be translated one time. We will apply the translation to all the strings that are the same.
I hope I answered your question
Hi Elchin,
Were you able to test if Weglot properly supports the collection pages within Webflow? (E.g. not only the static pages.) This is a critical point for me to understand as it is still a bit unclear, and I haven’t managed to test it out yet.
Best,
Santeri
Hi Santeri,
I haven’t tested it out yet. Hope will get to that next week (I want to finish the whole website). I will keep you updated on that.
But it seems not the right solution I want. I hope webflow will provide a native solution for this soon. Personally I do not prefer to use too many third party integrations.
Cheers,
Elchin
I’m going to be building a lot of multi language sites using Webflow, and it seems easy enough to create collections with dual languages within the collection, but each collection only creates one template page. So, the tricky part is getting a template page for each language without creating a separate collection for each language.
Can you imagine any workarounds for this?
Hi @eugene_weglot that sounds great and I’m leaning heavily towards WeGlot. However, my research so far seems to indicate that subdomains lose a lot of power in terms of SEO, which makes a huge difference with regards to marketing and search visibility. Does Weglot address this issue?
For context, we’re migrating the site to Webflow, and the SEO pro on the team has pointed out that the site’s current ranking and SEO benefits might go down as a result of using a subdomain… and of having the second language’s urls not match the ones on the old site (with 1000’s of products, 301 redirects will be tough).
Weglot sounds like a dream but this SEO issue has been a sticking point. Same with the untranslated URLs, I worry about these as my clients site is not a services provider like Airbnb, but a seller of products.
If, however, these issues are addressed somehow, I can make a case for WeGlot, as it is indeed super easy to set up and offers lots of value for the client in terms of management.
Thanks!
Hi @Yaco,
Weglot is only working via subdomains on Webflow for the moment unfortunately. We are fully aware of the long debate around subdomain VS subdirectory The official Google response is it makes no difference as long as Hreflang and/or Sitemap is well configured.
Concerning the untranslated URLs, we are working on it! I have no official release date but it should be available soon.
Best,
Eugene
That’s great news Eugene.
How About google analytics, google search console? This will be important for Google Ads, marketing, tracking, etc, as we have an expert on the team who will work on those aspects.
How does this work with Weglot?
Thanks!
- Google Analytics: The hostname will be different (depending on the subdomain) so you can track data for the different language
- Google Search Console: Good question. I’m asking our team and I’ll get back to you on this.