Multilingual website
Definition
A multilingual website serves each visitor in their language, with separate addresses per language and hreflang markup that routes search engines. In Belgium, it is often strategic.From Brussels, the multilingual question almost always arises: serving your clients in French and Dutch, often in English, can double your addressable market. But badly built multilingual does more harm than good.
A real multilingual website means: separate addresses per language (/fr/, /nl/, /en/), hreflang markup telling the engines which version to show to which audience, an editorial translation (not raw machine translation, your credibility depends on it), and an editing interface that manages each language without duplicating the work.
The classic trap: multilingual added as an afterthought to a base that never planned for it. The result is fragile workarounds and diverging content. Best practice is the opposite: an architecture designed multilingual from the start, even if a single language is published at launch.
It is one of the structural strengths of Wagtail, whose localisation is native. Multilingual is included in our Business and Premium packages (see our offers). To decide what to translate first, read do you have to translate everything into Dutch?
Do not translate everything at once: start with the pages that carry your client acquisition (home, services, contact). Partial but polished multilingual beats complete but botched.
Frequently asked questions
No: the multilingual architecture is built once. What adds up is the translation of the content and its maintenance. On a CMS designed multilingual from the start, each additional language costs far less than the first version.
Translate what the target audience will actually read: the offer, the sectors, the contact page. A partial but polished version beats a full automatic translation, which visitors and search engines spot quickly.