Creating a multilingual site in Squarespace

Translate your website into multiple languages while keeping it search engine-friendly.

With our Weglot integration, you can generate translated versions of your website in several different languages. Visitors navigate between the different translations through a drop-down menu that displays in your site’s header. This makes your site multilingual, ensuring that international audiences of different languages can engage with your content.

Weglot translates up to 2,000 words into another language on your site for free, and has affordable pricing plans for translating more content into more languages.

The Weglot integration is currently only available for version 7.1. If your site is on version 7.0, you can manually create a multilingual site.

Watch a video

Connect to Weglot

To connect to Weglot:

1. Open the Language & Region panel.
2. In Site languages, under Multilingual by Weglot, click Connect.
3. Click Allow.
4. Create a Weglot account. If you already have a paid Weglot plan, you can sign into your existing account and click Create a new project. We don’t recommend using an existing account on a free plan or an expired trial, as you may not be able to make use of the full word count available on a newly created account.
5. Set your original language from the Original languages drop-down menu.
6. Select the language you want your site translated into from the Destination languages drop-down menu.
7. Click Save. A language switcher now displays in your site's header.
8. After saving, open your site in an incognito window, change languages in the language switcher, and navigate through your pages. This populates your translations on your site and ensures you can edit them on Weglot.

Weglot trial and plans

With Weglot’s ten-day trial, you can translate a site of up to 10,000 words into one other language. This includes any customer notification emails you want translated. After your trial is over, if you have 2,000 or fewer words translated into one other language, you can use Weglot’s free plan. If you have more than 2,000 words, or need to translate into multiple languages, you can sign up for a paid plan. To learn about pricing and features for Weglot's paid plans, visit their pricing page.

Keep in mind, if you have more than 2,000 words after your trial and you use the free plan, translations won’t display. To display translations, you can sign up for a paid plan or remove translations to stay within the 2,000 word limit. To learn more, visit Weglot’s documentation.

What doesn't translate

When you connect Weglot, most of your website content is translated to your chosen destination languages.

The following features are not yet integrated with Weglot and can't be translated:

• Email Campaigns
• Acuity Scheduling
• Third-party content blocks, like Foursquare or Instagram
• Member Areas login screen

Other content won't appear translated without certain requirements:

• Error messages and button animations - To translate, set up language subdomains
• Commerce checkout page - To translate, set up language subdomains and checkout on your domain

Manage Weglot in Squarespace

After connecting Weglot, you can manage your Weglot settings on Squarespace in the Site languages panel.

Translations

To make changes to your translations, click Edit Translations to open Weglot. It’s not possible to edit translations directly on Squarespace. To learn more about editing your translations, visit Weglot's help center.

In Squarespace, you can set your translated languages to Public or Private. When a language is public, it appears to public visitors as an option in the language switcher.

When a language is set to private, the language switcher still displays when editing your site, but it won't display for public visitors. Keep in mind, if you set all your translated languages to private, the language switcher is still visible with only your original language. To hide the language switcher, customize your site header.

Multilingual customer email notifications

Translated customer notification emails are enabled by default when you connect to Weglot and the emails count toward your word limit.

Customers who shop on your site will  receive notification emails in the same language they were using when they browsed your site. For gift card purchases, both the purchaser and the recipient receive their notifications in the language the purchaser used.

To preview your translated emails, open the Commerce panel, click Customer notifications, then select the language you'd like to preview in the View in drop-down menu.

To disable this feature and ensure your notification emails aren’t translated, open the Language & Region panel and switch the Multilingual customer notifications toggle off.

Weglot account

Under Weglot account, you can review your current plan and word usage. If you need more words or languages, click Browse Plans to open Weglot and upgrade your plan.

Multilingual SEO

You can make your site searchable in multiple languages by adding language-specific subdomains. To learn more, review the following section.

Language subdomains

Language subdomains are language-specific URLs for your site. For example, if your site is https://yourmultilingualsite.com, the Spanish subdomain would be https://es.yourmultilingualsite.com.

If you try out Weglot and decide it's the right option for your multilingual site, we recommend setting up a language subdomain for each of your destination languages. This automatically adds hreflang tags to make your site searchable in multiple languages, and offers a faster, fully-translated experience to your visitors.

While you can use Weglot without setting up a language subdomain, you may notice some content (like error messages or button animations) won't appear translated, and that visitors in other languages may experience a slight lag in translations loading when navigating between pages.

Set up a language subdomain

If you already have a domain connected to your site, click Setup Subdomains in the Site languages panel to take you to Weglot, where you'll be guided through the next steps.

If you don’t have a custom domain connected to your site, the option to set up subdomains doesn't appear. To register or connect a custom domain to your site, click Add Domain. After setting up the domain, you can return to the Site languages panel and click Setup Subdomains.

Customize the language switcher

The fonts and colors of the language switcher follow your site’s global styles. To customize other display settings:

1. Click Edit on your site, then hover over your header and click Edit Site Header.
2. Click Elements.
3. To hide the language switcher entirely, switch the Language Switch toggle off. Use this to temporarily hide your translations.
4. Select Text Only, Icon & Text, or Flag & Text from the Display drop-down menu. Icon & Text displays a globe icon next to the language switcher. Flag & Text displays a flag representing the selected language.
5. If you select Flag & Text, select Circle, Rectangle, or Square from the Flag Shape drop-down menu.
6. To change the size of the globe icon or the flag, use the Language Icon Size or Flag Size slider.
7. Click Save to save your changes and keep editing, or click Exit and then Save to close the editor.

Disconnect your Weglot account

To disconnect your Weglot account from your Squarespace site:

1. In the Home menu, click Settings, then click Extensions.
2. Click Connected Extensions.
3. Click … next to Weglot and click Disconnect.

Note: If you signed up for a paid Weglot plan, disconnecting Weglot from your site won’t cancel your Weglot subscription. To cancel your Weglot subscription, log into your Weglot dashboard.

Who to contact for support

For help with setting up the integration or the display of the language switcher on your site, contact Squarespace support.

For all other issues, contact Weglot’s support team at support@weglot.com, or visit their help center. Weglot can help with:

• Billing for your Weglot plan
• Canceling your Weglot subscription
• Editing your translated content
• Setting up multilingual subdomains
• Translation display on your site
• Upgrading your Weglot plan

Manually create a multilingual site

If you're using version 7.0, or if the Weglot integration doesn't work for your needs, you can set up a multilingual site manually in Squarespace.

Keep in mind, you'll need to manually translate content for every page on your site, and there are other limitations. We recommend using our Weglot integration if possible.

Basic structure

While your site's structure can vary depending on your content, manually built multilingual Squarespace sites generally follow this formula:

• A homepage that links to each version of the site, so visitors can go directly to their preferred language.
• A set of pages, or a single scrolling page of multiple sections, in each language. 
• A drop-down menu of links for each language, to help visitors navigate through the content.

To review what this might look like in practice, visit this example site.

Limitations

Before you begin, keep in mind the limitations of building a multilingual site manually:

• Squarespace sites can only display built-in text, like on the checkout page, in one language. This also affects certain metadata throughout the site, like dates on blog pages.
• Squarespace sites can only sell products for one currency at a time.
• You can't have different domains or subdomains for different languages.

Structure your pages

To set up a multilingual site:

1. Set a homepage and move it to the Not linked section of the pages panel. We recommend starting with a blank page, then customizing it later. You'll come back to your homepage at the end of these steps.
2. In your main navigation, add two folders. Each folder name should be the name of one language, like English or Español. These drop-down menus appear on every page to help your visitors navigate each page in their language. If you just created your site, delete any demo pages. 
3. In the first folder, click + Add Page to add all the pages in one language. The first page in the folder should be the landing page for that language.
4. In the second folder, add a second version of each page in the second language, copying the same order as the first folder. To speed up the process, you can duplicate pages from your first language, then update the text.
5. Return to your homepage in the Not linked section and click Edit. Add text or buttons that link to the first page in each language's folder.
6. Finish styling your homepage.
7. When you're ready, publish your site. If your site is new, you can go through our site launch checklist to ensure that every part of your site is ready for visitors.

How navigation displays

If you structure your site using folders as described above, the navigation menus display on every page of your site.

Here's an example of how your navigation and homepage might look. 

If you only want one language's navigation links to display at a time, there are a couple options:

• Add all your pages to the Not linked section, then use content links on each page to create a navigation.
• Create multiple sites, and add external links to the main navigation. Keep in mind, each site will be billed separately, but this is a good option to offer a different currency for each store or use different subdomains for each language.

Other options for 7.0 sites

If your site is on version 7.0, there are different ways to customize your multilingual site:

• To create a single scrolling page for each language, use index pages.
• Use a cover page as your homepage to guide visitors to pick their language.
• We recommend these templates:
• Adirondack - Has on-page navigation bars (example)
• Nueva (or any template in the Brine family) - Has long scrolling index pages, multiple navigation areas (example)
• Pacific (or any template in the Pacific family) - Has long scrolling index pages (example)
• Review the guide for your template to learn about other unique features.

Watch a video

This video is for version 7.0.

Multilingual site SEO

Presenting your content in multiple languages can affect your site’s SEO. For example, even if the content on your site appears in multiple languages, your content won't necessarily be searchable in the translated languages without optimizing your site.

Specific SEO strategy falls outside the scope of Squarespace support, but your options vary depending on the multilingual setup your site uses.

Weglot

If you're using Weglot, ensure you set up language subdomains.

Language subdomains ensure search engines can find your content in other languages, serve the correct language version of your pages in search results, and won't flag your pages as duplicate content.

We recommend our Weglot integration for the most optimized experience.

Manual setup

Google Search Console and Moz have tips on keeping your multilingual site search engine-friendly. If you need more help, you can hire a Squarespace Expert to set up SEO for your site.