Would You Like to Translate Your Website? Consider Weglot for WordPress

In this in-depth Weglot review, we’ll explore its features, pros, and cons to help you decide if this AI website translation plugin is worth integrating into your WordPress website. 

We’ve been using Weglot for WordPress for over three years, and it’s been nothing short of our SEO rankings: Weglot helped us to get the first position in the SERPs on several keywords (in French and German) with just a few clicks.

This is a real review based on our experience of this excellent plugin for WordPress.

Let’s dive in!

Why is Weglot Important for Website Translation?

Weglot isn’t just another name in the business. Founded in France in 2016, it has grown tremendously, supporting multiple Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more. Today, it powers AI translations for over 110,000 websites worldwide.

For the record, our current CTO, Thomas Deneulin, coded the first version of their WordPress plugin back then.

Weglot is available for free, with paid plans starting at $17/€15. You can also try it out for free for 14 days.

The Multilingual Advantage with Weglot

Once you install Weglot, your site will display a language switcher, usually as a flag icon. Users simply click on it to translate the website into their preferred language. This improves user experience, significantly boosting international traffic and search engine rankings.

There’s also evidence that translating your site makes you more visible on LLMs: translated sites gain 327% more visibility in AI Overviews for queries in non-primary languages. So there’s definitely a lot to gain when going multilingual.

An In-depth Look at Weglot’s Features

From AI translation to professional translation and multilingual SEO optimization, Weglot has got it all. Let’s examine the features that make Weglot amazing!

Easy, Lightweight, and High-Performance Translation

Weglot automatically detects and translates your entire website the moment you activate it, then continuously updates translations as you add new content—no manual syncing required. This hands-off approach saves hundreds of hours typically spent managing multilingual sites.

Setting up Weglot in WordPress is a breeze. Just install the plugin, input your API key, select your original and target languages, and you’re good to go. 

Unlike other translation plugins, Weglot doesn’t require additional language packs or multilingual SEO functionalities, streamlining your website’s performance.

After installing and activating the plugin, you are almost done. The only step necessary to enable AI translation is to copy your Weglot API key and select the original and target languages.

Your website will immediately display a language switcher menu that visitors can use to choose their preferred language. You can customize the switcher’s design and placement to match your site perfectly.

In contrast to other popular translation plugins, Weglot doesn’t require you to install additional language packs or extensions. It’s a complete solution that handles translation, language detection, and SEO optimization out of the box.

Your translated content will be properly indexed by search engines, as Weglot automatically implements multilingual SEO best practices—including hreflang tags and language-specific URLs. This brings us to our second point: is Weglot SEO friendly?

Is Weglot SEO-Friendly?

Absolutely, Weglot is optimized for SEO. Our website has seen significant improvements in SERPs in multiple languages

Just look at this screenshot.

As you can see, some of our top keywords are in English, in French and in German and this only because of Weglot. 

If your native content is already optimized for SEO, then Weglot will just skyrocket your page in the SERPs top results in other languages.

This is possible because Weglot has been built for SEO. Here are the four main SEO assets of Weglot:

1. A unique URL is created for each version of your web page. The plugin automatically creates “/[2-letter code]” sub-directory for each translated version of your pages. 
2. hreflang tags are automatically added to your source code by Weglot. In this way, Google knows you have different versions of the same page, and will index these pages more often. Hreflang tags can be found in the <head> tag of your website source code.
3. The Weglot translation process takes place server-side, meaning your content is translated into your source code (and not just dynamically with a JavaScript solution, which is bad for SEO)
4. Weglot automatically detects and translates SEO tags, like meta description tags.

Weglot is compatible with SEOPress, Yoast, and many other popular SEO plugins.

AI Language Model for Smarter Translations

Weglot’s AI Language Model improves how website translations are generated and refined. Instead of relying only on standard machine translation, it’s powered by OpenAI and Gemini to use contextual understanding to produce results that better match the meaning, tone, and phrasing of the original text. 

The model can also be trained on your brand’s preferred style and terminology. This ensures consistent translations across all pages, especially when working with technical or branded content.

Once the initial translations are generated, you can review and edit them directly in the Visual Editor, translation strings tagged “GenAI” on your Translation List, or collaborate with translators in the dashboard. The AI Language Model speeds up the process while giving you hands-off translations, leaving you to focus only on fine-tuning the details that matter.

The AI Language Model comes standard on every plan, even the free one. Meaning you get OpenAI and Gemini-powered translations from the start regardless of your budget.

Powerful Visual Editor for Manual Translations

If you want to translate your content quickly and easily without having to hire a translator, AI translation is the perfect choice for you. Weglot supports instant translation, as well as visual editing, to make editing translations super easy. This is a total no-brainer.

Indeed, your translated content can be edited right from the front end of your website through its visual editor. It only takes a click on the Visual Editor tab to start editing. 

Weglot does 98% of the job, then you just have to get through your website with Weglot’s visual editor to fix the wrong translations.

Full Control Over Translations

Weglot gives you complete flexibility to manage translations your way. Use the Glossary feature to set translation rules for brand terms, product names, or industry-specific vocabulary, ensuring consistency across every page. You can exclude specific pages, sections, or content blocks from translation, which is particularly useful for market-specific landing pages or for managing your word count budget.

The Translation List and Visual Editor make it easy to review and refine translations in context. See exactly how your content appears on the live site while editing, ensuring translations maintain the right tone and fit properly within your design.

For teams and agencies, Weglot includes built-in collaboration features. Assign translations to specific team members or external translators, track which content has been reviewed or is still pending, and add context notes to guide your translators. This workflow management gives you complete visibility into your translation progress and ensures quality control at every stage.

You can also choose your translation approach: start with AI translations and refine them as needed, order professional human translations directly through Weglot’s integration with translation agencies, or use a hybrid approach that combines the speed of AI with human expertise for critical content.

Translation Statistics

You can view your translation requests for any time period, presenting a line chart illustrating how viewing habits have changed over the past few weeks, months, etc. It also gives you a breakdown of which languages get the most views through a pie chart, and lists your top five most popular translated pages.

You can also check out which countries frequent your website the most through Page Views.

Weglot’s translated page views are key to understanding how Weglot helps your business and what languages visitors are reading your website in.

An Outstanding Support

When I write a plugin review, I always check support reviews. This is not a surprise at all, but Weglot has amazing reviews on both Trustpilot and WordPress plugins directory.

Weglot reviews on TrustPilot

What really amazed me is how people are saying that the support is perfect/excellent/awesome. 

Translating a WordPress website is something serious, and it’s important to know that you will enjoy a good support if you encounter an issue with it.

Weglot reviews on WordPress

Pros and Cons of Using Weglot

Weglot vs WPML: The Ultimate Showdown

People often ask what is the difference between Weglot and WPML. Here is a breakdown:

Ease of Use

First things first, let’s talk about user-friendliness. Weglot is renowned for its simplicity. Installation and initial setup can be done within minutes. It’s like a “plug-and-play” solution for website translation. You insert your API key, choose your original and target languages, and voila! Your website is ready to greet a global audience. Its Visual Editor and Translation List also make reviewing translations easier, and the Glossary gives you even more control over your translations.

On the other hand, WPML offers a robust set of features but has a steeper learning curve. It might take some time to get used to its dashboard and options. So, if you’re someone who likes to get into the details and have more granular control, WPML is your go-to. But if you’re looking for an almost immediate setup, Weglot has the upper hand.

Translation Quality

Both Weglot and WPML offer AI translations, and they both support manual corrections. However, Weglot’s AI Language Model takes this a step forward by allowing you to specify how you want your translations to sound right away. Its visual editor makes real-time changes a breeze, especially for those without a technical background. This is a lifesaver for businesses that want high-quality translations but don’t have the in-house capabilities to execute them.

WPML doesn’t offer a visual editor in the same sense. You can still manually correct translations, but it’s often a more cumbersome process.

SEO Capabilities

Now, here’s where things get interesting. We already know that Weglot is SEO-friendly. It does an excellent job in creating unique URLs for each language version and automatically adds hreflang tags. This is great for multilingual SEO optimization. It also translates SEO tags like meta descriptions, making it a comprehensive SEO solution.

WPML also offers strong SEO capabilities, but it can require additional configuration and is generally more hands-on. This might be a plus if you’re an SEO aficionado and enjoy tinkering, but for those who want a more streamlined experience, Weglot takes the cake.

Performance and Compatibility

One of the major concerns with any WordPress plugin is how it impacts website performance. Weglot is lightweight and highly performant, meaning it won’t slow down your site. WPML, while incredibly feature-rich, can be more resource-intensive, so you might need to optimize your site for speed when using it.

Both plugins are compatible with popular SEO plugins like Yoast and SEOPress, as well as various WordPress themes.

Pricing

Weglot is available for free and has plans that fit many budgets, where you’re essentially paying for convenience and quick setup. WPML is also a premium plugin but offers different pricing structures, allowing for a bit more flexibility depending on your needs.