I know some version of this has been asked a lot, but if anyone can give some advice on my specific use case, I would be grateful.
I am in process of setting up a new site that will have two different versions as my business operates in two different countries with two different languages. Eventually there may be more regions / languages. My original thought was to set it up with subdomains as necessary such as mysite . com for the primary country, and mysite . com / othercountry for the second.
This is not just a simple matter of translation – each site will have location specific information as the services that I offer vary based on some local laws and policies. That said, the structure of the site(s) will be at least 90% identical, and a lot of the content will be the same, although written specifically for each language.
The question is best strategy to handle initial use case and growth. To be clear, I have used WP multi-sites for years– I am aware of their pain in the ass nature, and I do have a few premium plugins that I would prefer not to have to purchase for each sub-site. Of course SEO is also a consideration.
But that said, in this case does a multi-site actually make sense? Or should I just manage it via folder structure? I anticipate having a language selection menu that is universal to each subdomain and will essentially direct users to the appropriate subfolder for their language and content.
I am thinking using subdomains makes the most sense in the beginning, but does it continue to easily scale if I eventually have ten or twenty subdomains / languages?
One other thing to note, is the for the subdomains, each will have a 301 redirect from a local domain URL. So for example if the second country were Spain, it would have a local domain mylocalsitename . es that redirects to mysite . com / es.
All advice is appreciated… thanks.