Webflow now has full, native multilingual support.
What is Multilingual Support?
I'm going to divide multilingual support into 5 levels;
- The ability to change the displayed language with a language selector, and to have translated content appear based on the new selection.
- Plus, full path and SEO support. Language dirs like /jp, or subdomains, like zh.mysite.com. Body lang attributes for each page translation, and hreflang links to alternate translations.
- Plus, advanced support. Localized paths. Multi-language sitemap.xml.
- Plus, content management and translation support.
- Plus, team, 3rd party translator, and workflow support.
Multilingual Options
Webflow
Highly recommended, Sygnal uses this exclusively for our clients. It's highly controllable and configurable, and the translations are excellent. Keeping everything on one platform and in the same designer is just super convenient.
It's convenient and fast. Easy to vary styling, and control specific things like image changes on different locales. Fantastic quality. Support for localized SEO, localized slugs ( with pro ), and it does all of the SEO things right- the sitemap, canonicals, alt hreflangs, all automatic.
The only downsides I've found are these four points, none of which are major except on rare projects;
- Webflow's localization is not automated. That means when you update content, you need to update the localized content as well. That's fast, but it's an extra step.
- For larger sites ( not yours ) there's a limit in the number of different locales you can have, then you're pushed to Localization Pro, which has a cap of 10 max. It's rare, but these sites exist, I just worked on one that has about 30 locales.
- No native support for locale-specific domains, e.g. if you want one site, but delivered under one domain for the UK and another for Germany. This can be done though, we've just set this up for a client using a reverse proxy and it works beautifully. Natively, locales are split by path, like /de/.
- Auto-routing. The pro plant's auto-router detects the user's locale and routes. However it does it on the basis of the browser's language setting, and not their physical location. The problem is if you have different locales in the US and UK because you want different information, auto-routing generally won't work because browsers in both places are generally just configured for "en". The router can't choose. Still easy for users to switch, it's just not automatic. Again, an edge case.
My advice is that unless there's a specific reason you can't use Webflow ECom effectively on your project, use it. Your site and your project will be so much better.
WeGlot
The most widely established solution so far, and historically, it appears to be favored by Webflow users. However it has some known SEO issues with hreflang links.
PolyFlow
Newly announced? Nice integration with the Webflow designer, seems to be designed specifically for Webflow.
Forum announcement 25-Nov-2022.
I believe the polyflow site itself is based on Webflow + Polyflow
Note;
- Appears to always redirect languages to a subdir, including the default language.
- The Polyflow site does not appear to have a sitemap.xml, or a manifest.json. Not sure what that means for e.g. redirects, and SEO.
- Body lang attribute observed
- Language hreflang links observed
- > I suspect this is why even the base language is "mirrored", since Polyflow would need to modify that page
Sygnal's Multilingual Toolset
Suitable for very small sites, and simple translation needs.
