If your business serves an international audience, a multilingual website can help you reach your target market and explore new global markets. You make your website multilingual by adding a new language under Website settings in Loopia Sitebuilder.
Before you start
We recommend creating all of your important pages – Home, About us, Contact, and so on – before making your site multilingual. That way all your existing pages are created in the new language at once, so nothing is missing.
Number of languages per package
How many languages you can have depends on your Sitebuilder package:
- Small and Medium include support for 2 languages. On Small, you can only have one page per language.
- Large and Webshop include an unlimited number of languages and the ability to translate pages with AI.
Adding a new language
- Click the Main menu in the top-left corner of Sitebuilder.
- In the sidebar, click Settings to open the Website settings menu.
- In the Multilingual tab, click Add language.
- In the Add new language menu, choose the language you want to translate your site into (scroll the dropdown or start typing to search).
- Click Submit. The secondary language is now added under the Multilingual tab.
Your site is now multilingual. You can start translating your content manually into the secondary language, and you can also swap out images and blocks entirely so that different audiences see different content.
Note: once your site is multilingual and you select the language in the language switcher, all pages are created with demo content in that language.
The language switcher
Once you’ve added a secondary language, a language switcher appears automatically both on your published site and in Sitebuilder’s top bar, making it easy to move between languages while you work. The flag icons adjust automatically to match the languages you’ve added.
The Manage languages link takes you straight to the Multilingual tab in Website settings. On your published site, the language switcher lets visitors choose a language version of the site.
Translating and managing language-specific content
You can control which content is shown to different regions. A multilingual site lets you show different product offers for specific countries and give a more tailored experience to users in each market – you can offer a language-specific product catalogue, and use different images, backgrounds and layouts on your language-specific pages.
You can translate your language-specific content yourself, or with the help of modern tools such as:
- Sitebuilder’s own AI translation (requires Sitebuilder Large).
- Online translation services: Google Translate (free), Gengo (paid), Translate.com (with a free option), ChatGPT, and many others.
- Hiring a human translator via Upwork, Fiverr or similar freelance platforms to polish the text in the language you need.
Changing the main language
The main language is what visitors see when they load your site. By default, the language you built the site in is also the main language.
To change it, go to Main menu (the hamburger menu in Sitebuilder’s top-left corner) → Settings → the Multilingual tab. Or use the shortcut: click the language switcher → Manage languages, which takes you straight there.
Click the house icon next to the language you want to set as the main one, confirm by clicking Submit in the pop-up, then click Submit again in Website settings.
Remember to publish your site for the change to become visible.
Managing language-specific pages
Once you’ve added a new language, Sitebuilder creates copies of your existing pages in the main language. These new pages have matching language settings, which you can check under Pages → Page Settings → Language Code.
Creating new pages in a secondary language
See our guide on translating individual pages with AI in Loopia Sitebuilder for more.
Translating language-specific navigation
See our guide on setting up navigation for a multilingual website in Loopia Sitebuilder for more.