Hi, what would you suggest to be an ideal way to switch from having duplicated pages, to the Webflow
localisation? Currently we have 3 duplicates of our website (en-gb, en-us and da-dk).
My main concern is, how to handle the duplicated CMS collections? We have a collections for blog articles and webinars, that are unique for each locale and not necessary the direct translations.
Currently we have a collection for each locale, meaning 3 collections that would need to be merged into one. How to handle the existing articles in those collections? We have over 100 articles in english and danish collection and those are unique for each country, so they are not direct translations.
Would it be sustainable to save as draft all articles that are not supposed to be shown for danish/english locale, or is there a better way to handle this?
I was very excited when the localisation has been finally realesed, but the migration from duplicated pages has been stressing me out, as I dont want to end up with tons of 404 pages. Any help is super welcomed.
Here’s the thing; Webflow localization doesn’t appear to have any support for locale-only content. Meaning ever page and every CMS item, must be in all locales.
There are creative ways to fix that, but it a fair bit of engineering, and probably not worth the heavy lift.
On top of that, if your paths are localized, you’ll already need the Advanced localization plan, which is close to the cost of a separate site plan for each locale.
So the only benefit you’ll get out of localization for your project is the machine translation, and only for articles that you want to machine translate. If you have separate localization content teams anyway, that may not be a benefit.
Thanks Micheal for your reply!
We already have an advance plan so that’s not an issue.
The biggest problem with our current system with duplicates pages, is that its quite difficult to manage, when getting last minute feedback, I always have to implement the changes 3 times, and its been super annoying and prone to make more mistakes. On top of that, with the website growing we will soon hit the limit of the total pages (currently we have 137/150 pages).
Would it perhaps work, if I would leave the Danish only collections, and save as a draft all the danish articles for US & UK locale? Or would these pages be in the sitemap and we would get 404s on all articles that are saved as a draft? What other “creative ways” would you suggest?
I’m not sure how you will handle the orphaned locale pages. Usually I would build a reverse proxy so that e.g. the /de/page would be returned but /fr/page would return a notice like “this page only available in German…” with a link to it. But that’s a bit of engineering work to build.
However if you were to go forward with localization, the process is generally, for each “duplicate” page, you’d
Build your primary locale page
Localize it to your other locales, copy hand-localized content over if you need to
Draft ( later delete ) the original “duplicate” page
Add a redirect from the old URL to the new localized page
And repeat this process until your site is done.
I help businesses through localization projects, so drop me a line if you need guidance on this.
