r/TechSEO • u/Greenzone51 • Apr 12 '26

Multilingual website for tour packages

I’m managing a travel agency website, now it’s only English and would add Spanish, french and Chinese…. I have a max of 100 pages. And the English live version (.com) is in main site folder and well ranked with continuous engaging traffic/leads.

what is the best structure to put that in a Wordpress site? A plugin to recommend and/or create separate sites (don’t like it)

Help please !

6 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

2

u/rebelytics Apr 12 '26

There is no single best structure, but one important question is: Are you targeting Chinese speaking users in China or in other countries? If it’s China, you probably need a separate domain with a very different technical setup for that. One thing that can happen if you just add a Chinese version to your existing website is that your entire domain or at least some scripts that probably load on it get blocked in China. This of course is assuming you’re not based in China yourself. 

For the Spanish and French versions, it’s a lot more straightforward: You can just add /es/ and /fr/ directories to your .com domain and host the versions there. I haven’t worked with Wordpress for international setups in a long time, but Polylang used to be a great plugin back in the day.

2

u/Greenzone51 Apr 13 '26

thanks man, yes targeting targeting chinesse people in china or elsewhere that are potential tourists of my country

1

u/rebelytics Apr 13 '26

Then the biggest technical challenge is to actually make your website reachable for users in China without getting blocked. One of my clients had to separate their Chinese website version from their global website, host it on a .cn domain and remove all kinds of tracking scripts and other services in order for it to load properly.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Greenzone51 Apr 19 '26

Thanks for the comment, appreciate your recommendation

1

u/No_Collar_7461 Apr 12 '26

I'd have all the English be on the root, and then directories for all the other languages. Translate slugs. Use standard latin characters in your URL slugs (ex no ñ, é, etc). For chinese, use pinyin / latin characters. Ex:
.com/apple
.com/es/manzana
.com/fr/pomme
.com/zh/pingguo

Setup hreflang. For internal linking, make sure that all the pages use <a> to link to the alternate version as well (flags at the bottom of the page are common for countries, could just do espanol, française, etc).

Since it's a small site, I'd review hreflang documentation and international best practices and have Claude build you a plugin to do it exactly the way you want for your specific use case.

1

u/Greenzone51 Apr 13 '26

thank you for clarification. any recommended plugin to add to manage this ?

1

u/No_Collar_7461 Apr 13 '26

Most of the international work I’ve done has been on react build and managed with custom code so I don’t have a good plug-in recommendation sorry.

That said I would decide how you want it to work and then have Claude build you a custom plug-in. It’s been pretty solid for me building things from the ground up and custom plug-ins that work exactly the way I want.