Multilingual Website Development Diary - Day 21: Multilingual Website Complete! (3 Key Learnings)

On January 16th, I finally completed three multilingual websites. While I finished the first website on January 5th, optimizing it afterwards, which involved repeated plugin installations and deletions, took considerable time. The biggest lesson I learned from this process is as follows.

“Running a multilingual website involves more considerations than I initially thought, requires a high-performance server, and server speedis paramount.”

Furthermore, I now fully understand why durumis initially aimed for 38 languages but ultimately reduced it to 18.

In my case, using the Hostinger startup plan to manage 49 languages proved somewhat problematic. The main issues I encountered are as follows.

1. Translation Speed Issues
The translation speed was slower than expected. Publishing a single page takes about 5 minutes to translate into 49 languages. The problem is that you have to manually visit and refresh each language page. Failure to do so risks automatic indexing requests being made in the language you wrote in, leading to duplicate content classification.

2. The Burden of Image Uploads
Uploading a single image has the effect of applying it to 49 language pages. With Hostinger's server, uploaded images are automatically converted to AVIF and WEBP extensions to reduce file size. However, even with this, slow speeds when users click search results and navigate to a page can increase the likelihood of bounce rate. For this reason, I've shifted the blog's direction towards minimizing image usage.

3. Difficulty Optimizing PageSpeed Insights
Despite considerable effort in SEO optimization, I failed to achieve a perfect 100 score across all four metrics. While this process was challenging, I ultimately decided to abandon the pursuit of perfection. Striving for flawlessness led to significant stress, hindering efficient work.

This experience has shown me that running a multilingual website goes beyond simply translating content; it requires extensive management and optimization. While there were more aspects to consider than anticipated, it provided an opportunity to learn new technologies and operational methods.