11 Proven Tips for Designing a Multilingual Website in 2020 and Beyond

1. Use Global Templates

To provide better UI and UX design to the visitors of the multilingual website, developers need to make use of the global templates for designing a multilingual website. By doing so, viewers experience the site design, and other elements of the multilingual website without any changes while switching the site language.

2. Use Language Switching Option

Placing an option for switching site language will provide users with the convenience of viewing the site in their native language. At the same time, adding multiple languages for your multilingual site will attract more audiences from different parts of the world.

3. Option for Choosing Language

It would be wise to allow site viewers to choose their preferred language in which they would like to view the site. Several multilingual websites put barriers for their visitors to pick their region to view their site in the region-based default language which is wrong. Lets the visitors choose in what language they would like to view your site.

4. Auto Language Choosing

Well, this option of placing auto language choosing could offer a better UI design. Developers are highly recommended to detect the primary language set by the users on their browsers and switch their website accordingly. Also, there should be the option to choose the site language for visitors to view the entire site.

5. Provide Space for Text Expansion

While designing a multilingual website, the developer should be cautious about designing web layout because while translating the web content the length of the original text and text orientation will change. So there should be enough space for text expansion which is a challenging issue for developers in designing a web layout. The entire operation would be almost similar to a website redesign.

6. Use Culturally Appropriate Images & Icons

When it comes to a UX design of a webpage, images, icons, and other graphical content are the essential elements. Those elements should be subjective to a cultural context according to the region. This can be done when a visitor changes site language.

7. Dates & Other Formatting Options

For designing a multilingual website care should be given for placing data format. Because almost every European country follows the Date-Month-Year format, however, in the US and other countries the Month-Date-Year format exists. So, proper date format must be placed according to the region of the site viewers.

8. Design Pages for Both LTR & RTL Languages

A multilingual website should be compatible with all languages especially for the languages used in middle-east countries. For that, developers need to design pages suitable for placing texts in right-to-left directions. It is referred to as “flipping the interface” of the common way of representing texts LTR (Left-to-Right) direction.

9. Consider Web Font Encoding & Compatibility

As a developer, you should be always specific when it comes to encoding multilingual web pages and choosing compatible web fonts for web pages. Experts highly recommend using UTF – 8 for better display of special characters in the web pages.

10. Structure Multilingual Website URL

When it comes to designing a multilingual website as a developer you need to be more specific and focused on structuring the website URL. To structure a multilingual website URL, these days’ web developers follow several ways and easy of those has its own pros and cons.

Here we have listed the 3 best methods to structure a multilingual website URL.

• ccTLD (Country-code top-level domain) e.g. www.example.fr
• Subdomain+ gTLD e.g. fr.example.com
• Subdirectory+gTLD e.g. www.example.com/fr/

11. Go for Multilingual SEO

Well, opting for multilingual SEO is the most important aspect because it drives you more potential consumers from different parts of the world. After summarizing the golden rules of SEO, you need to convey that your website design has a different version of pages to the search engine giant Google. For that, you need to make use of the specific sitemap or hreflang tag for easy access.