Translating WordPress to English is not about opening each page and rewriting it. It's about making four decisions at the beginning —URL structure, scope, engine, and review workflow— and letting the rest be mechanical work. This guide covers all four, in order.
To the point: first decide the URL structure. Changing it later, once Google has already indexed, costs much more than doing it right on day one.
1. Choose how the English URLs will be
There are three common ways to publish a second language, and only one is reasonable for most projects:
- Subfolder (
tumarca.com/en/servicios/). It's the default option: it inherits the authority of the main domain, is configured in minutes, and costs no extra money. - Subdomain (
en.tumarca.com). Google treats it almost as a separate site. It makes sense if the team for each market is different. - Own domain (
tumarca.co.uk). Maximum localization signal and maximum maintenance cost. Only if you are serious about that market.
If in doubt, subfolder. This is what WP-Translate does by default and what Google's documentation recommends for most sites.
2. Decide what's in and what's out
Before launching anything, take inventory. A typical WordPress has much more text than it seems:
- Pages and posts, with their titles and excerpts.
- Menus, widgets, and theme texts ("Read more", "Search...").
- Categories, tags, and their descriptions.
- SEO metadata: title and description of each page.
- If you have a store: product pages, attributes, cart texts, and order emails.
Translating only pages and forgetting menus is the most common mistake: the visitor arrives at a perfect English page and finds a Spanish menu.
3. Translate with AI and review what matters
Current engines —DeepL and Gemini leading the way— provide a publishable result for commercial texts. The workflow that works is this:
- You launch the automatic translation of the entire site in the background.
- The plugin marks each string as "pending review".
- You manually review only what is visible and what sells: headlines, buttons, prices, legal texts, and the contact page.
- The rest is published and you refine it over time.
With WP-Translate, that review is done on the English page itself: you open your website, click on the text, and correct it while seeing the real design. It's the difference between correcting a sentence in a spreadsheet and seeing it inside the button where it will live.
Protect your brand terms
Add your company names, product names, and technical terms you don't want translated to the glossary. It's a minute of work that prevents finding your brand "translated" in a hundred places.
4. Finalize SEO before taking it for granted
A poorly tagged two-language website is duplicate content. Check these four points:
- Reciprocal hreflang on all pages: the Spanish version points to the English one and vice versa.
- Canonical of each version pointing to itself, not to the original.
- Sitemap by language, sent to Search Console.
- Translated metadata: Yoast's title and description are also text.
If the plugin you use doesn't do these four things automatically, you'll end up doing them manually.
How long it really takes
For a twenty-page corporate website: one afternoon, including review. For a store with several hundred products: automatic translation runs alone in the background and the review is spread over several days, starting with the best-selling product pages.
What never costs time again is maintenance: each new page is translated upon publication, in one click.