Multilingual Manufacturer Website

The new site is built around a single content structure in WordPress, with WPML linking each page to its translations. Product pages, industry pages and service information exist once in the source language and once in each target language, always connected, so a new machine added in one place appears in the translation queue for every market.

A custom theme with Advanced Custom Fields keeps technical content such as specifications and downloads in structured fields. That makes translation more precise and stops layout from being re-built by hand in each language.

• One content structure with five connected language versions
• Structured technical fields for consistent translation
• New content automatically queued for every market

The real problem with the old site was not translation itself but drift. Once a page was translated, nobody knew when the source changed. Now, whenever a source page is edited, its translations are flagged as outdated automatically.

Each territory can see which of its pages need attention and how far translation has progressed, so nothing is left silently out of date for years. Head office keeps control of the master content, and markets keep their versions current.

International SEO for manufacturers depends on search engines understanding which page serves which market. Every language version has its own URL, reciprocal hreflang tags pointing to its equivalents and a canonical tag pointing to itself. Search engines can now see five related pages for five audiences rather than five copies of the same thing.

Correct hreflang implementation ended the duplicate-content confusion between markets, so buyers searching in German, French or Spanish are more likely to land on the page written for them.

Enquiries used to arrive in a central inbox and wait to be forwarded. Forms on the new site route by territory, so a request from a buyer in one market reaches that market's sales team directly, alongside the local contact details shown on the page.

Regional teams also maintain their own contacts, customer references and certifications within the brand template. They can keep their part of the site accurate without asking head office or a developer, while the overall design and product information stay consistent. Performance is supported by PHP 8, MySQL and Redis object caching.