So I have a good experince with WordPress, but we hired an outsource agency to create our bilingual website.
I was shocked to find that they “translated” the website using ACF instead of WPML or Polylang.
So, they basically made the website in English, then created a custom field for each of the post components like: “custom field for the title in Spanish, custom field for post content in Spanish, etc…
In short, WordPress doesn’t understand that it’s a bilingual website, but rather just replacing the text when the user clicks on the language flag 🙂
For me, I see this as a huge mistake and not a best practice, but the developer is arguing about this so much, can I get your feedback on this? It will definitely be terrible on the SEO Front and the website is not 100% translated and we’re limited with the custom fields they built.
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For functionality, not great but it’ll more or less work (but not at the speed you want). For SEO, bloody horrendous.
So a user has to pick their language every time they load a page?
Thats not good, WPML is the way to go it has got a bit of a learning curve but once its figured out it makes the whole thing simple.
I suspect they don’t know how to use it and have instead engineered a workaround they understand instead.
The first muti-language site we built had a blooming awful design which made no account for the need for WPML at all, we had to resort to using ACF to deal with some of the awkward design elements. We learnt the lesson and the next one had a more friendly design (after a lot of pushing from my end!)
Uh, this seems wrong. Very wrong.
The biggest problem is that this solution isn’t working with the browser’s native ability to use the user’s location and computer settings to automatically tell the server what language to serve. There is language detection built into everyone’s browser already, the button shouldn’t be necessary whatsoever.
And it breaks accessibility entirely. Someone using an assistive browser is going to be lost when the buttons all read out in a different language.