Seperate domains for localisations

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hello, i need to create website with locale switcher - i have multiple domains one for each localisation. My question - is it possible to use those domain for localisations? for example when i switch from english to deutsch, it changes from domain.com to domain.de?

I have found this, but seems like this post is really old and possibly out of date.

Is it possible to have more domain’s on one website? - Publishing help / General - Forum | Webflow

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There is probably a way, but I haven’t tried any of these approaches yet.

First, I’d recommend that you change as little as possible. That means a few key things;

  • The paths remain, e.g. /nl/...
  • You still have a locale switcher, it just defaults to the locale described by the domain
  • You use non-localized paths for predictability

The simplest approach I can think of is this;

  • The primary domain will still be the primary domain, let’s say that’s domain.com.
  • Alt domains would redirect to the primary, but would prefix their path with the language code, so e.g. https://www.domain.de/something would redirect to https://www.domain.com/de/something.
    • That redirection has to be external. I generally do that on Cloudflare but there are a lot of options.

That’s it, you’re just wrapping localization as it works now, and auto-switching.
Once you’re on a /de/ path locale page, Webflow switches all of the URLs.
Not perfect, but simple means probably-reliable and cheap to implement.

If you want localized paths, you can, but you’d need a more complex redirect map.

If you really need custom domains and you want the custom domains to remain visible as the user is using the site, you’ll probably have to look at a solution like Weglot. With Webflow you’d need a full reverse proxy setup and it would be quite tricky to make it work properly.

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Ha! I just figured out exactly how I’d build out a reverse proxy to do this. And it should work perfectly with Webflow’s localized paths features as well.

I’m not suggesting that’s the way you should go, but if you want your Webflow site “mirrored” cleanly under a localized domain name, I think I have a complete solution design for that.

You would still have a locale switcher of sorts, but it would send the user to the alternate site.

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That’s a solution i’d personally go for. However it has to be on those seperate domains because it’s a transfer from wordpress which works exactly like that to webflow. Thank you so much for advice!

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If you’re interested in building out the reverse proxy approach, let me know, it looks like an especially fun project.

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So I pay 29 dollars per month to webflow for the translation, now it seems I was beter off with weglot. #earlyAdopterFail