My current situation:
- A Wordpress blog in two languages: my native language + English.
- Setup with Polylang as follows: ‘www.domain.fr’ and ‘www.domain.fr/en’.
The issue:
- The complexity of maintaining a two-language blog has made me procrastinate and stopped me from writing new material.
- Since both posts in my native language and in English are doing equally well, getting completely rid of one language, is something I prefer not to do.
In the future:
- I would like to write most of the time in English, sometimes in my native language and on occasion in both.
- I would like that, when someone visits my website, they see all posts, not only for “their” language since most people from my country speak English well and would otherwise miss all the English-only posts.
- Using automated translations is not something I’m open to.
I’ve been breaking my head about this issue and now have found two possible solutions, please let me know what you think of them from UX, SEO, technical or practical perspective.
Possible solutions:
- Build the complete website as an English (no WPML or Polylang) website, but write some posts in my native language and mark them with a category tag so visitors know which posts are in which language. This would mean that sidebars, footers en navigation are still in English. I’m worried on how this would impact SEO.
- Continue to use Polylang to have two versions of the blog, but use a custom query (https://polylang.pro/doc/developpers-how-to/) to display all posts (all languages) on both versions. One issue here is that navigation, foot etc. will switch everytime a visitor opens a post in 'the other' language.
