how do i make a bilingual website that google can index?

web · 2026-09-18 · 3 min

a bilingual site is two sites that share a design. that is the sentence to keep in mind, because most bilingual sites fail by treating the second language as a button on top of the first.

each language needs its own url — /en/ and /it/, or example.com and example.it — its own title tags, and its own content written by a person. a cookie that swaps the text without changing the address is invisible to google and confusing to anyone sharing a link.

urls and hreflang

the structure matters more than the tool. pick one pattern and keep it: subdirectories (/en/, /it/) are the simplest for a small site, subdomains work, separate domains are the most expensive to maintain.

then add hreflang tags: each page declares its own language and its counterparts. this is how google knows the italian page is not a duplicate of the english one, but a translation. get the codes right (it, en, and en-gb if you need it) and make them reciprocal.

the tool decision

on wordpress the two names are wpml and polylang. wpml is heavier, paid, and handles complex setups; polylang is lighter and has a free tier that covers most small sites. both create the language urls and the hreflang for you.

on a builder, check whether multilingual is included or an upsell — wix and squarespace have their own localization features, with limits on how much of the structure you control. on a custom or static site, the languages are just routes and a translation file, which is more work to set up and much less work to keep honest.

none of these translate anything. they organize the translation you provide.

what actually needs translating

not every word. the pages that sell — home, services, contact, the legal pages — need a native speaker, not a machine. blog posts can wait. translating a page nobody reads in italian does not make the english site better.

keep the same facts in both languages: prices, hours, names, addresses. a bilingual site where the two versions disagree is worse than a monolingual one. if the site is also the first real web presence, the same page has to work in both languages at once: realizzazione siti web a parma.

faq

do i need hreflang if i have separate domains?

yes. separate domains make it even more important, because nothing else tells google the two pages are the same offer in different languages.

can i just use the google translate widget?

you can, and it will look like a site that does not care. it also does not create indexable urls per language, so the second language never ranks.

should i translate the blog too?

only the posts that bring customers. start with the five pages that sell, then translate a post when someone asks for it in that language.