Best practice recommendations for enabling multiple languages on your site?

[emilydavidson]

I find that the advice for multi-language sites is always tied with multi-region, but what about US only sites that want to be multi-lingual?

What are the best practice recommendations there? HREFLANG tags necessary? TLDs? Do you need to purchase yoursite.us , yoursite.sp , etc.. or would yoursite.com/en yoursite.com/sp suffice? Should the extensions be region based even if the language is the only difference?

[emilydavidson]

Thank you for your response!

Unfortunately, we're not working within wordpress, so it's not as simple. The article you referenced was very easy to follow but im concerned that it's a bit outdated since it was from 2010 and we all know best practices change. I'm hoping I can use it as a basic guide to share with my dev team. Thanks!

[BlueCorona]

Great question! This guide is particularly helpful if you're looking to easily create a multilingual website on WordPress: http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-easily-create-a-multilingual-wordpress-site/

If you're not working with WordPress, the tips in this article may be more helpful: https://www.nomensa.com/blog/2010/7-tips-for-multi-lingual-website-accessibility

From the most basic standpoint, what you'll need to do is assign a primary language and then whichever multiple/alternative languages you wish to display on the site within the code. The link above will show you how to do so on your website.

I hope this helps!