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Having a multilingual site is now the norm, given the constant globalization and the business opportunities that are offered in proposing one's services and products at an international rather than a national level.
Regardless of the business you intend to develop or whether on your WordPress installation you use an ecommerce extension such as WooCommerce or not, what we want to advise you is to weigh the choice when selecting the plugin that will be used to translate the site into multilingual .
In the beginning it was (and sadly still is) WPML.
Until recently, the market choice for WordPress multilingual translation was WPML, which stands for WordPress Multi Language.
Virtually all blogs related to WordPress development have recommended it endlessly, both geared to newbies just introduced to the world of WordPress development and blogs for professionals with much higher skills.
The basic concept was certainly adequate for the period and for what the market was offering in terms of solutions available for multilingual translation of WordPress-based sites.
Unfortunately (fortunately) things have evolved over time and even today we continue to recommend WPML as a panacea for all ills, without mentioning and taking into account the serious side effects that this solution will irremediably bring to your business, much less recommending new and promising solutions that already in the WordPress Enterprise world are now considered the only (let's say the ONLY) noteworthy solution that can combine functionality, simplicity, and usability without compromising the performance and speed of your WordPress installation.
What would you think of someone who continues to steadfastly recommend the steam train as a fast means of transportation when you know full well that the Frecciarossa exists? Would you believe someone who insists on such nonsense, loudly repeated and shared by a pack of artless fools, or would you think they're completely mistaken?
If you think the steam train is museum stuff, outdated and useless in our day, you should start wondering if WPML isn't an absolutely outdated system as well. It is about your business, your sales and the serenity of your visitors.
Performance, a major factor and a major problem with WPML
While it is true that WPML is practically unanimously recommended, this does not mean that today it is the best solution that can be adopted on forward-looking projects that require multilingual translation capabilities.
In fact, it must be said that choosing a plugin rather than another irremediably compromises the entire future of your site. Imagine, for example, that you commission or create a company site yourself in 4 different languages and once you have finished you realize that the pages of the site load in 5 or 6 seconds instead of the second and a half that you had measured when your site did not have multilingual support. .
Imagine the navigation of a user on your site, on your ecommerce and the endless frustration that a slow and cumbersome navigation can derive from an old and poorly designed plugin that uses macaronic hacks to be able to perform (badly) its multilingual functions.
This is what happens with WPML.
Being developing without taking into account the best practices, being in fact anti pattern and anti codex, making use of unlikely tricks such as external proprietary tables and infinite JOINs at the level of SQL queries it is obvious and obvious that something is missing in terms of performance.
That something is sometimes a matter of seconds, in other cases of many seconds.
We won't delve into the studies that claim that every second of loading time means losing about 10% of visitors , and therefore potential sales. This is a well-established fact, and if you think a site that opens in 2 seconds is basically the same as one that opens in 6 seconds, you'd do well to delve deeper into the topic and possibly review it once you've understood that a website is something serious that can provide enormous satisfaction and also enormous disappointment if you don't follow the advice of those like us, who are called upon every day to solve problems caused by improvised developers who follow the fads of the moment, rather than common sense.
MultilingualPress, the solution to all ills for fast and snappy sites.
Whatever people say, WPML isn't the only solution for creating multilingual websites. MultilingualPress is currently the only valid solution for getting the most out of its features without compromising performance in the slightest.
There are no affiliate programs, we have no vested interests, and we don't earn a single euro in commission for saying what we say. We simply like to be leaders in the high-performance hosting sector , and having to deal with slow and cumbersome plugins like elephants certainly doesn't benefit us system administrators, nor you developers or customers.
However, we can say with mathematical certainty that all those times that we have "disassembled" a very slow site made with WPML to bring it to MultilingualPress that all the problems of loading speed and performance have been solved.
Just as some customers have gone from 16-core server instances with 64GB of RAM costing $ 200 per month to more modest solutions, saving more than half on server rental costs.
Nice to save, isn't it?
What is MultilingualPress?
MultilingualPress is a WordPress plugin created by Inpsyde that helps you create multilingual websites with performance in mind. It's based on a native WordPress feature, Multisite.
WordPress Multisite installations allow you to create and manage multiple websites or blogs using a single WordPress installation. Therefore, all these sites share the core CMS files—the files that make WordPress work—but they also share themes, plugins, and databases.
On the other hand, the tables relating to the individual sites remain separate, and therefore the contents, as well as the media library.
By taking advantage of the common elements, you can very easily manage different sites, which will however be hosted within the same server.
It is with this approach that MultilingualPress works, i.e. the generation of a multisite network where this plugin allows you to manage translations by creating a multisite site for each translation. The advantages are the same as those of a multisite network, not having any slowdowns on the application side and being able to centrally manage all translations in an absolutely fast and professional way.
How reliable is MultilingualPress?
Let's say it's so reliable that it's a guaranteed and recommended component from WordPress VIP and high-performance hosting like WP Engine with which we even share the same software stack.
In short, we are not talking about Pizza & Fichi, but about WordPress himself, Mr. Matt Mullenweg and all his AUTOMATTIC to be clear. Big stuff, guarantees and certainties so to speak, no runaway or improvised programmer in the creation of slow plugins like WPML to be clear.
Inpsyde is a WordPress Agency Partner (you can check it out for yourself here https://vip.wordpress.com/partner/inpsyde/ ), which means that WordPress itself recommends and approves the proposed MultilingualPress solution as a solution officially adopted by their company for high-profile clients that you can view in their portfolio.
The cost ? Absolutely affordable.
The only noticeable drawback of a multilingual solution of this caliber is the €199 per year per site cost. Although in an open-source environment where many plugins are free, the cost of the plugin might be a bit daunting at first glance , you need to consider not only the initial cost, which can be considered a form of insurance for your site's high performance, but also the certainty of not having to backtrack and adopt it later once you realize that a plugin like WPML has made your site slow as a snail. At that point, porting all your content from WPML to MultilingualPress could prove to be a tedious and complex task, which is why it's advisable to start with the right tools right from the start rather than trying to save €100 or so and then entering a valley of tears, according to the now familiar and well-established rule: those who spend little spend twice.
Absolutely recommended therefore, to the delight of hosters, developers and customers.
