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Landing Page with 35 languages
Joomla offers powerful out-of-the-box multilingual functionality, allowing you to easily build multilingual websites. Time for an experiment: How far can you go with a multilingual Joomla website?
Spoiler: definitely up to 35 languages...
Setting up a multilingual website with Joomla is relatively straightforward. However, managing it requires more attention: each additional language takes more time, especially if you want to publish each new article in all languages. Our experiences with our own multilingual websites:
db8.nl
Our company website is available in 5 languages, but only the Dutch and English pages are consistently maintained. The German, French, and Spanish sections mainly cover the homepage and contact section.
petermartin.nl
This personal website includes Joomla and Linux presentations given domestically and internationally. All articles on this website are consistently available in both Dutch and English.
de-beste-website.nl
This website focuses on website optimization and is available in 5 languages. Using a custom plugin, each language runs on its own domain:
- English: The best website: https://the-best-website.com/
- Dutch: De beste website: https://de-beste-website.nl/
- German: Die beste Website: https://die-beste-website.de/
- French: Le meilleur site web: https://le-meilleur-site-web.fr/
- Spanish: El mejor sitio web: https://el-mejor-sitio-web.es/
Landing Page with 35 languages: specialist.db8.nl
When setting up this landing page website, I wondered how far you could go with multilingual capability. By default, English (en-GB) is installed. When I added the Dutch language pack (nl-NL), I considered what the site would look like with many languages. Currently, Joomla 5.2 supports 48 languages, some of which are regional variants, such as English (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, USA), French (Canada), and German (Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland).
I decided to install 34 additional languages and explore how I could create a multilingual landing page website using custom fields and YOOtheme Pro. After installing the 34 languages, I had a total of 35 "Content Languages" available: Afrikaans, Arabic, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Welsh.
Not every language had the same "Title in Native Language." I made this consistent by listing the name of the language in its native form, followed by the English name in parentheses. In "Content Languages," the order of the languages determines the display order on the front end. I sorted the languages by their native names and used the English name for languages with non-Latin character sets.
Next, I wrote an English article and divided its structure into sections. Then, I created custom fields to keep the structure consistent. For each language, I made a copy of the article and rewrote the English text. All articles are linked to each other, which makes the "Association" column quite lengthy:
I had initially hosted the website on a joomla.com domain. Joomla.com provides a platform where you can easily set up and host a Joomla website for free under a subdomain of your choice. However, the speed of this free service is limited, making it less suitable for a business website. I tried to optimise the speed by setting the cache settings to the maximum. I was still not satisfied with the speed, so I decided to move the website to my own server.
When configuring the language selection, you can choose between a dropdown list or direct display, and between flags or written language labels. With 35 languages, the dropdown list proved too long, and flags are less suitable as they represent countries, while language regions are often broader. Therefore, I chose to display the language selection at the bottom of the website, sorted according to the order of the "Content Languages."
