Multilingual Homepage

Hi guys,

I'm in need of some advice.

My site used to have Translatepress installed and recently tried WPML. Both these plugins fuck / slow down my site badly.

As I'm only interested in translating the landing page (homepage) wouldn't it be better for me to create pages with /de/, /nl/ etc etc.

I'm in need of some advice in this:
- Will translating just the homepage cause seo issues? ie homepage translated but not product pages.
- Where do I even start? I assume its more than just creating the pages.

Thanks!

I did manual translation just for the homepage on /de/, skipped WPML — site got faster, no drop in rankings. Just add hreflang and proper canonical. Don’t link untranslated product pages with hreflang or you'll confuse Google. Worked fine for low-volume GEOs.

NeedMyLink said:

I did manual translation just for the homepage on /de/, skipped WPML — site got faster, no drop in rankings. Just add hreflang and proper canonical. Don’t link untranslated product pages with hreflang or you'll confuse Google. Worked fine for low-volume GEOs.

Click to expand...

Proper reply thanks. Regarding the product page thing you mentioned:

If the homepage were to be /de/ and theres a button that goes to the product category (in english), this will not be good? Whats a solution to this?

Wilcoo1 said:

Proper reply thanks. Regarding the product page thing you mentioned:

If the homepage were to be /de/ and theres a button that goes to the product category (in english), this will not be good? Whats a solution to this?

Click to expand...

Cleanest setup is: link to /de/ homepage → internal links go only to other /de/ translated pages. If you don’t have those yet, noindex the /de/ version or use JS to swap language visually but keep canonical to /. Half-translated setups tend to get filtered or ignored.

NeedMyLink said:

Cleanest setup is: link to /de/ homepage → internal links go only to other /de/ translated pages. If you don’t have those yet, noindex the /de/ version or use JS to swap language visually but keep canonical to /. Half-translated setups tend to get filtered or ignored.

Click to expand...

So basically, only translating the homepage isn't going to do well because I'd have to translate the whole order flow as well?

The goal is to have an English site with just translated homepages (de/fr/nl etc)

Translating only your homepage won’t cause major SEO issues if you use hreflang tags, add language switchers, and manage the user experience, but untranslated product pages may increase bounce rates and limit keyword opportunities. Manually translating pages is faster than TranslatePress/WPML (<3 seconds) and starts with planning languages, creating pages, implementing hreflang, adding switchers, optimizing technical SEO, building language-specific backlinks,

Any others with opinions/experiences on just translating the homepage and no other pages?