It can be hard trying to decide which multilingual option you should choose for your Squarespace website.
Squarespace still haven’t added any multilingual features to their site, so if you want to have a multilingual website it can be tricky. Squarespace do provide some kind of solution which involves manually creating language-specific pages for each language and then adding these pages to their own menus along with some JavaScript to hide those menus for specific users based on their language choice.
If that sounds complicated, it’s because it is and it’s why we created the Multilingualizer in the first place.
The Multilingualizer solution
With the Multilingualizer, you get to continue using your existing Squarespace editor to add texts but rather than having to create and maintain separate pages we provide the ability to keep your translated texts on the same page. The Multilingualizer then hides whatever text the user doesn’t need to see.
With this approach, your URLs will not be translated however – and additionally text snippets as seen by social media previews and Google previews will regularly contain both texts since these previews just grab the text from your page rather than running the JavaScript which would otherwise hide the irrelevant text for your users.
Because of this, we added a language-specific pages feature where you just add {en} at the end of your page title and menu link and the Multilingualizer will properly group these pages together. So, for example, you could have an {en} page followed by an {fr} page in your menu and if the user changes language, it will redirect the user to the appropriate page for their language.
Advantages of the Multilingualizer
The biggest advantages of the Multilingualizer are that it’s very quick to install, you get to keep using your familiar Squarespace editor to edit text and we offer a low one-off fee. We also have no limits on traffic volume or number of languages (other than the character limit in Journal category names).
It’s simple to set up and simple to use. For these reasons we have thousands of very happy customers.
Disadvantages of the Multilingualizer
There are a few drawbacks to the Multilingualizer unfortunately. The first of these is that some areas in Squarespace have character limitations – for example, if you configure a category in your Journal, there is a character limit of 32 characters. That means that if you have many languages, these category names will not be able to be translated as you wouldn’t be able to fit all the category names into the text box on your Squarespace website.
Additionally, due to PCI compliance, we are not allowed to run JavaScript on your checkout pages – that means if you’re running an eCommerce store then the Multilingualizer may not be the best solution for you as your users will see the translation on the product pages and the basket, but once they reach checkout they’ll see the product name in all the languages you’ve added.
The Weglot Solution
Weglot have introduced a new and elegant solution which creates subfolder copies of your main website.
What that means is that if you have a URL like this:
www.multilingualizer.com/about-us/
Then Weglot will provide you a new page called:
www.multilingualizer.com/fr/about-us/
or:
fr.multilingualizer.com/about-us/
The above page is a completely separate page and follows all the best practices for multilingual websites except for URL translation. However, URL translation is not as important as you may think and in fact Google themselves don’t translate URLs for different languages on their own site.
When users visit your new URL, they will technically be hitting Weglot servers which will in turn produce your page based on www.multilingualizer.com/about-us/ (styles, templates etc all copied over) with the text changed according to what you have entered into the Weglot system.
Because of this approach, Weglot *can* translate your checkout pages for your eCommerce store. Additionally, there is no problem with character limits in Squarespace categories or any other box with character limits. Finally, snippets that users see on social media or Google search results will be in their language.
We have hesitated to recommend our competitors in the past because of their blatant profiteering. If you take a look at the pricing of Localize for example, you’ll see $600 per year for 2 languages, or $3300 per year for the next level up of 5 languages.
Bablic is similarly poor on pricing – their basic level looks quite good at first glance at $288 per year for 2 languages until you realise that this doesn’t include your translated text reaching Google. What that means is that if you translated your site into French, your users would have to search on Google in English, visit your website and then switch over to French. That’s not at all what people expect from a translated website. If you want your translated text to appear in Google, the minimum price with Bablic is $792 but even that doesn’t include URL translation. If you want URL translation, you have to spend $2988 per year with Bablic – that pricing is a bit better than Localize but it’s still extortionate in our opinion.
Weglot on the other hand offer great pricing, given the quality of their solution and the fact it works all the way through the checkout process and has great SEO even at their entry level option. Their starting price is $99 per year for 2 languages or $190 for 4 languages. That’s a fantastic price in comparison to Bablic and LocalizeJS and even gives the Multilingualizer a run for its money.
Other benefits of Weglot are their automated machine translation which can be very useful to get you started quickly as well as a system to access human translators if you need that service (for an additional cost).
How to choose between Weglot and the Multilingualizer
Ultimately it boils down to whether you have an eCommerce store on your Squarespace website or not. If you do then we recommend you choose Weglot. An additional factor may be if you need access to their machine translation or human translation systems.
If you don’t have an eCommerce store and you have no plans to add eCommerce then we think you should pick the Multilingualizer for its simplicity, great SEO and low one-off price.
Otherwise, if you’d like to try Weglot, they have a free trial available through this link and the best pricing and feature set out of all our competitors.