WPGlobus – Multilingual WordPress

Description

WPGlobus is a family of WordPress plugins assisting you in translating and maintaining bilingual/multilingual WordPress blogs and sites.

Quick Start Video

Please also read the Quick Start Guide.

Important Notes: please read before using WPGlobus!

  • NO AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION:
    • WPGlobus does NOT translate texts automatically! You will translate texts manually.
  • PAGE BUILDERS / COMPOSERS:
    • WPGlobus supports blocks (“Gutenberg”) and WPBakery Page Builder. Other builders, such as “Page Builder by SiteOrigin”, “Beaver Builder”, Fusion (“Avada”), Elegant (“Divi”), Elementor, etc. have limited or no support.
  • IF YOU UNINSTALL, YOU LOSE TRANSLATIONS:
    • WPGlobus stores all translations using a special format: {:en}English{:}{:fr}French{:}{:es}Spanish{:}. If you decide to deactivate and uninstall WPGlobus, you must run the clean-up tool to keep only one language. See the details on the “Welcome” tab in the WPGlobus Settings.
  • COOKIES:
    • WPGlobus use browser cookies to store the selected language in the form wpglobus-language=xx where xx is a two-letter language code: en, de, fr, etc.
  • NO MULTISITE:
    • The multisite mode (multiple virtual sites sharing a single WordPress installation) is not tested and not supported.
  • FREE PLUGIN with PAID EXTENSIONS:
    • Some functionality is available only with our premium add-ons. Details below.
  • OLD PHP / OLD WORDPRESS:
    • We develop and test our software using the latest versions of PHP, WordPress, and all plugins. If you have an older version and something is not working properly – please upgrade before contacting us.
  • MBSTRING:
    • For the full UTF-8 compatibility and better performance, please make sure that the Multibyte String PHP extension is enabled.

What is in the FREE version of WPGlobus?

The WPGlobus plugin provides you with the general multilingual tools.

  • Manually translate posts, pages, categories, tags, menus, and widgets;
  • Add one or several languages to your WP blog/site using custom combinations of country flags, locales and language names;
  • Enable multilingual SEO features of “Yoast SEO” plugin;
  • Switch the languages at the front-end using: a drop-down menu extension and/or a customizable widget with various display options;
  • Switch the Administrator interface language using a top bar selector;

The WPGlobus plugin serves as the foundation to other plugins in the family.

When do I need WPGlobus Premium Add-ons?

  • To translate URLs (/my-page/ translates to /fr/ma-page, /es/mi-pagina and so on);
  • To “postpone” translation to all languages and publish only those that are ready;
  • To have completely separate menus for each language;
  • To translate WooCommerce products and taxonomies;
  • To have separate “focus keywords” for each language in the Yoast SEO;
  • …and more.

For more details, please check out the descriptions of each paid add-on on our website:

  • WooCommerce WPGlobus: adds multilingual capabilities to WooCommerce-based online stores.
  • WPGlobus Plus: adds URL fine-tuning, publishing status per translation, multilingual Yoast SEO analysis and more.
  • WPGlobus Language Widgets: Multilingual widget logic: show and hide widget depending on the current language.
  • WPGlobus Header Images: Display different header images per language. Show images depending on the settings in the Customizer.
  • WPGlobus Menu Visibility: Show or hide menu items depending on the current language.
  • WPGlobus Mobile Menu: makes the WPGlobus language switcher menu compatible with mobile devices and narrow screens.
  • WPGlobus for the “Bridge” theme: create different sliders for each language when using theme “Bridge”.
  • WPGlobus for Ultimate Member: enables multilingual for all forms of the Ultimate Member (login, registration, user profile, etc), the Member Directories pages, the admin settings that are visible on frontend.
  • WPGlobus Multilingual Popups: enables multilingual support for the following plugins: Popup Maker – Popup for opt-ins, lead gen, & more; Popup Builder — Responsive WordPress Pop up.
  • WPGlobus Multilingual Notices: adds the multilanguage capabilities to various WordPress GDPR/cookie notifications plugins.

Compatibility with WordPress Themes

  • WPGlobus works correctly with all themes that apply proper filtering before outputting content.
  • As most of the themes save their settings in the options table, you can use the WPGlobus Translate Options plugin to process those settings correctly.
  • Some themes incorporate 3rd party plugins (e.g., sliders, forms, composers) – not all of them are 100% multilingual-ready. When you see elements that cannot be translated, please tell the theme/plugin authors. We are ready to help them.
  • Read more on the topic here.

Compatibility with WordPress Plugins

We have tested WPGlobus with many plugins. However, since plugins are frequently updated, some adjustments may be required after a new update. We will do our best to monitor and make the necessary changes on our end.

Some 3rd-party plugins are supported with our premium add-ons:

Permalinks

IMPORTANT: WPGlobus will not work if your URLs look like example.com?p=123 or example.com/index.php/category/post/.

Please go to Settings->Permalinks and change the permalink structure to non-default and with no index.php in it. If you are unable to do that for some reason, please talk to your hosting provider or systems administrator.

Note: WooCommerce adds their own section to the Permalinks. It is important to fill in all the information. For example, you need to specify your Shop Base, for example, /product/. If you leave it blank, WooCommerce will try to translate the base (eg /produkt/ for German), which will result in a 404 error.

Developing on `localhost` or custom ports

WPGlobus may not work correctly on development servers having URLs like //localhost/mysite or on custom ports like //myserver.dev:3000. Please use a proper domain name (a fake one from /etc/hosts is OK), and port 80.

Screenshots

  • The Welcome screen.
  • Settings panel.
  • Languages setup.
  • Attaching language switcher to a menu.
  • Editing post in multiple languages.
  • Multilingual Yoast SEO and Featured Images.
  • Language Switcher widget and Multilingual Editor dialog.
  • Multilingual WooCommerce store powered by WooCommerce WPGlobus.

Installation

You can install this plugin directly from your WordPress dashboard:

  1. Go to the Plugins menu and click Add New.
  2. Search for WPGlobus.
  3. Click Install Now next to the WPGlobus plugin.
  4. Activate the plugin.

Alternatively, see the guide to Manual Plugin Installation.

FAQ

Please read these first:

No automatic translation

WPGlobus does NOT translate texts! You need to translate texts manually.

After deactivating WPGlobus, all my pages look like garbage!

What you see is a mix of the languages, which WPGlobus knows how to handle when it’s active.
When you deactivate WPGlobus, your site is not multilingual anymore, and you have to remove all translations.

WPGlobus stores all translations using a special format: {:en}English{:}{:fr}French{:}{:es}Spanish{:}. If you decide to deactivate WPGlobus, you must run the clean-up tool to keep only one language. See the details on the “Uninstall” tab in the WPGlobus Settings.

When I switch language, I am getting 404 on all pages

Please go to the Admin - Settings - Permalinks page. Make sure that the Common Settings is not set to “Plain” and then press the Save Changes button. It should help.

Is there a PRO version?

We do not make a “PRO” plugin that replaces the free one. Instead, we have a set of add-ons that extend the WPGlobus functionality. Please found them on our website.

NOTE: When you install an add-on, such as WPGlobus Plus, you must keep the WPGlobus plugin activated!

From the WPGlobus.com FAQ Archives:

Reviews

January 22, 2024
This plugin have had always several bugs, until they stop to support and now it’s in conflict with Gutemberg and none of them give any support!
December 2, 2023
There are far more better free plugins then WPGlobus. One big minus is how it works by adding {} language tags, then they do not bother to fix massive fixes like critical error conflict with latest Elementor versions.
December 21, 2022
There’s no way to show the language switcher in the new themes, and the current tutorial says to add as a widget. There’s no more widget support in wordpress. This plugin is very complicated to use.
December 11, 2022
It works some of the time but when it doesn’t work it doesn’t. Ask for support and you’ll be sent two year old links that talk about compatibility issues. Apparently these problems have been around for a while but they are not being fixed.
Read all 227 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“WPGlobus – Multilingual WordPress” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

“WPGlobus – Multilingual WordPress” has been translated into 2 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.

Translate “WPGlobus – Multilingual WordPress” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

3.0.0

  • Fix: PHP-8 warnings
  • PHP support: 7.4+
  • No longer supported: All-in-One SEO v3, older versions of Yoast SEO.
  • See changelog.txt for the older entries.