Multilingual site - best solution?

Hi there, I want to make my website available in both English and Dutch. I was wondering, what is the best solution SEO-wize, either duplicating the whole site and hosting it under a whole other url (for instance www.example.com and www.example.nl) which would create quite some extra costs ofcourse, or duplicate the pages within the same website and create a different language for each (for instance www.example.com/home and www.example.com/nl-home). I’m really hoping you could answer this as I’m very new to SEO.

Jorik

For the sake of SEO I’ve been using your plan B and duping the pages and joining the content under a flag link in the nav bar.

BUT with the introduction to dynamic content, I was really hoping we would get multilingual support.

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Hi steelmountain,
I’m a Japanese and new to Web Design so to Webflow CMS.
Is it easy to make/install multilingual Switch in to the nab bar?

I’ve used Localize.js on Squarespace websites before, but I’ve not had a multilingual project on Webflow yet. It is a javascript solution that replaces the copy with a translated version you define. It’s pretty sweet. Here’s the documentation for webflow: How to easily translate Webflow websites - Localize Integration Tutorial

I’ve never used the service on Webflow, but can verify everything works great on Squarespace. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with Webflow.

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On their site they say that for best SEO each language should have their own unique url like website.com/en and website.com/nl. Don’t know how to solve this in Webflow using localize. Ideas are welcome :grinning:

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Hi,

Just duplicate the page and create a switcher in the navbar, a permanent div on the edge or any way you can think of to show and easy link to the other set of pages.

The problem is creating the subdirectories and pushing all needed pages to that subdirectory…you can of course create a subdirectory “/es” for the static pages in the pages panel, duplicate those in each language and move them around however, webflow doesn’t give you the ability to move the dynamic template pages to a sub directory which poses the problem.

If you have a blog that needs to be in English and Spanish there’s no way to push those dynamic Spanish posts to the “mysite.webflow.io/es/…” Sub directory. Unless someone knows of an elegant work around that they could share I just can’t see how you can create a decent multi language site in webflow.

From a UX perspective I would imagine allowing users to create top level subdirectories and the ability to move dynamic template pages into them along with the static pages would solve the problem?

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From what I learned both folders for collection templates and multilingual native functionality is in the works. That will be very interesting. There’s no eta on this. I also would like translate the cms as well. It getting better and better :grinning:

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Hey, I know it’s an old thread and you probably found a way by now, but in case you haven’t, you might want to have a look at our product which works perfectly with Webflow. It’s a fast and easy solution for making a website multilingual. Works EXTREMELY well with SEO as well. I’ll leave a link over here so you can check it out:

I’ve tried this product and it has an important flaw:

When refreshing/loading the page, the Javascript takes a while to hide the text, so you first see the big chunk of text in all languages and, after 2 sec or so, the non-chosen language chunk of text hides and you see the website well.

Any way to solve this?

thank you
the best !

When creating static pages
I duplicate every page for each language
using folders
This provides a unique url for everything.

example…
/fr/pricing.html
/fr/about-us/html
/es/pricing.html
/es/about-us.html

When creating dynamic pages…
I use 1 page for all languages.

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Hi Revolution,
I do the same now actually! I sometimes wonder if this is sufficient for google not to penalize you for duplicate content though with the absence of hreflang tags. Do you, or anyone else know something about this?

jmlusiardo,

Which product are you referring to?

Want to point to this – might be a good solution too:

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Hey guys I used multiple languages (workaround) in this website check it out:

Hope it helps for now.

Hi. I need to build a multilingual website, English and Spanish. From your experience, what is your recommendation regarding domain - use one domain with different subfolders for each language or use different domains for each language?

Thank you for your answers,
Naama.

From what I’m read the absolute best solution is to use different domains for different countries. That way your using that countrys top domain and can easily work with language specific SEO. That solution is the hardest to maintain. Second best could be using sub domains like en.website.com, also hard to maintain though. Depending on the site and if you use Webflow you could use folders, also a little hard to maintain if you have to make design changes but you have easy access to every page and work with language specfic SEO. Easiest to maintain is to use something like Bablic or Localize.

Hope it helps =)

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