Say cheese! – A multilingual WordPress website

Having worked with French company, Lactalis, to refresh its UK website, we were asked to create a multilingual version for the Swiss division, Lactalis Professional CH. The company offers many famous dairy brands, including President, Galbani and Seriously and the purpose of the website is to showcase all the brands, products and recipes.

Before they came to us, Lactalis Professional CH didn’t have any web presence and wanted to use the UK site as a framework to build a multilingual site, encompassing German, French and Italian.

We avoided a multilingual plugin as they are often hard to integrate and maintain. Instead, we used a WordPress multisite setup, where each language has its own install within WordPress, meaning the content is duplicated for each language. Some of the benefits are that there is no need for separate login credentials: user profiles, database and installation are shared across all subsites. This means it requires less resources and is really simple to administer.

Mastering multilingual: “Our brands, unsere marken, nos marques, I nostri marchi!”

We also worked with a Surrey based translation company, Geo Languages to ensure it was correct across all languages. The multilingual version of the Lactalis Switzerland website is now live and proving invaluable in raising the company’s profile in Switzerland and beyond. Users can quickly move seamlessly between the German, French or Italian version using the language selector.

Since launch, it’s given the marketing team a platform to send out multilingual content across Switzerland and neighbouring countries, which has generated more leads for the team.

If you’d like to find out more about the design and development of a multilingual website, please get in touch, we’d love to help you.