TL;DR: Is it a viable solution to switch (without losing the translations) from a site with WPLM to a multisite to manage languages?
I’ll give a brief introduction: currently my site is developed with Woocommerce, with a theme purchased on Themeforest (called Woodmart), Elementor, and for language management (4 languages) I use WPML. Hosting is Siteground. The e-commerce was created with these plugins considering the requests and needs of the customer.
About a year after its publication, both following the addition of new plugins and following a significant increase in traffic, the site is experiencing an important period of slowness and peak downtime. By doing some staging tests, I realized that the site can recover its speed only after deactivating both the theme (I activated the Hello theme) and the WPML plugin.
Considering that I don’t have major problems replacing the theme, my problem concerns replacing the language plugin with a new one as I don’t intend to lose the translations made (more than 600 products and about twenty pages). I tried to follow Polylang’s solution but their translation conversion plugin doesn’t work and the server times out.
One solution my workmate suggests is to use multisite to manage the various site languages separately. Do you think this is a viable way?
It’s possible, but sounds like a very difficult way to improve performance. I would recommend considering the following:
– Moving to a better host for eCommerce (Kinsta or Pagely)
– Host content and eCommerce on separate WP installations
– Streamline both installations by rebuilding your template on a framework like GeneratePress, getting rid of all site builders, and minimizing plugins in the process
– Run New Relic to find any further optimization opportunities
It sounds like you have a lot of easier options before replacing WPML with multisite, which is possible, but would require some serious custom work and a lot of redirects that could create problems going forward. Also, in my experience, WPML doesn’t affect performance all that much.