How to Optimize Your Squarespace Website for a Multilingual Audience
A multilingual website is no longer a luxury for modern businesses, but a necessity to expand your reach. Squarespace Enterprise provides a powerful platform for designing multilingual websites that cater to various linguistic and cultural preferences.
Part of this comes down to Squarespace’s vast design options. Combined with a powerful multilingual solution like Weglot, you can optimize your company’s site for a global audience to unlock new growth opportunities.
Optimizing your website for a multilingual audience
Designing a multilingual website requires more than translating content from one language to another. It involves a deep understanding of and respect for your audience’s unique culture and extends to your website’s design and visual elements. As you develop your site for a multilingual audience, focus on the following areas:
1. Content
Tailor your content to specific cultural nuances. Go beyond literal translations to adapt content to the linguistic and cultural preferences of various language groups.
Establish consistency across all versions of your website while accommodating linguistic differences. This means using a consistent tone, style, and messaging across all languages (albeit with the flexibility to account for cultural differences).
To show your audience you truly understand them, consider using localized and colloquial language customs. This applies to date and number conventions for each language you target. As an example, for Gregorian all-numerical dates, the United States uses the MM/DD/YYYY format, while most European countries use DD/MM/YYYY. In some countries in East Asia, the format is different again: YYYY/MM/DD. If possible, run multilingual content choices by a localization expert to verify you don’t use outdated terminology or formatting.
A localization expert is someone who adapts assets like websites, software, or products to fit the context and culture of an audience in a specific geographic region. They modify content so that a site feels familiar to the target audience.
2. Design
Consistency is key when it comes to multilingual design optimization. Use the same templates and designs across all language versions of your site to establish familiarity and brand recognition.
This is an area where Squarespace shines. Beautiful, design-driven templates maintain your design choices, regardless of what language visitors use to access your site. With Squarespace Enterprise, you can edit the design across your sites from a centralized management dashboard.
Brand consistency extends to font choices. Select fonts that support a wide range of languages, including right-to-left (RTL) languages, like Arabic and Hebrew.
Text scaling also ensures that your site’s layout and alignment can accommodate text expansion and contraction across different languages. Some languages have longer words, phrases, and sentence structure, which can affect your content’s layout and spacing. Preparing for this can help maintain your site’s design and overall user experience.
Visuals matter, too. Use assets and stylistic choices that resonate with your target audience’s culture. This includes images, icons, and colors that have appropriate cultural meaning.
Finally, lean on design to call attention to the option for visitors to switch your site’s language. A language switcher offers visitors the option to choose their preferred language. Incorporate visual cues for language switching, such as flags or language codes.
Make language switchers prominent and simple to find in areas such as your site’s header or footer.
Squarespace’s Weglot integration provides a solution for switching languages on your website (more on this later).
Managing cultural sensitivity with design
When designing a multilingual website, it’s crucial to understand your audience’s cultural sensitivities and preferences. There are many factors that play into this
Choose appropriate colors
Selecting the right color schemes is essential in effective web design. An ideal color palette highlights important elements such as calls-to-action (CTAs) and improves navigation for first-time visitors.
Color conveys different messages to different audiences. For instance, while red signifies good luck and prosperity for some cultures, it may signal aggressiveness, danger, anger, or passion for others. Take a mindful approach to choosing colors for your website.
Avoid stereotypes, generalizations, and appropriations
While you may feel it’s a bonding technique to resonate with your audiences faster, using stereotypical imagery, symbols, or language may offend or misrepresent a particular culture. Instead, focus on authentic and respectful representations that celebrate cultural diversity, which you can do by consulting a localization expert. A great way to find a trustworthy localization expert is through localization agencies or SEO agencies offering these services. You can also request referrals from other businesses with localized sites.
Integrate inclusion and diverse representation
Strive to create designs that showcase inclusive and diverse cultural references. If you work with audiences around the world, tailor representations to each market. Collaborate with local artists, designers, and cultural experts from different regions. By involving individuals who have a deep understanding of the specific cultural nuances and sensitivities, you can ensure your designs are authentic, respectful, and resonate with the target audience.
Conduct thorough research and engage in open dialogue with diverse communities to gain valuable insights into their cultural values, symbols, and traditions. This can also help you make informed design decisions.
3. Translations
Providing translated versions of site content benefits brands with a global audience by establishing effective communication and engagement with visitors in multiple languages. It also enhances user experience, builds trust, and demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity, ultimately expanding the reach and potential customer bases in international markets.
Weglot’s translation service handles the heavy lifting of translating your Squarespace website. The tool automatically adds a language switcher feature to your site, which you can customize to align with your brand identity and design conventions. What’s more, you can also use Weglot to redirect users based on their language if a switcher isn’t appropriate:
Weglot will also translate all of your content, including metadata. The ability to offer a complete translation of your site is beneficial from a user experience perspective and can help search engines rank your pages better, improving your chances of reaching your target audience.
Learn more about using Weglot to translate your website’s content.
4. Technical SEO
Technical SEO is essential for site success, particularly when trying to reach global audiences. It ensures search engines can effectively crawl, index, and understand your website's content in different languages and regions. By optimizing technical aspects such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data, you can improve your website's visibility and user experience, and ultimately increase organic traffic from diverse international markets.
Technical SEO can be a complex aspect of running a multilingual website. Squarespace’s Weglot integration can manage a lot of this.
Weglot translates all site metadata (e.g., content names, publication dates, locations, tags, categories, etc.), which you can view in the tool’s dashboard. Review and optimize metadata for each language to confirm accuracy and relevance.
Weglot also translates and localizes your page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, and header tags to feature relevant international keywords for each language and region.
One of the most complex parts of multilingual SEO is hreflang tags. These are HTML attributes that tell search engines which language and regional variant of a site to serve to visitors with alternate language and location preferences. Without proper hreflang tags, search engines can’t differentiate between translated versions of your content, leading to confusion and potentially impacting your site’s visibility and rankings in different languages and regional search results.
Implementing hreflang tags means using plenty of code, which may not always be accurate or correct. However, Weglot implements hreflang tags as standard for every installation.
Learn more about using Weglot to manage hreflang tags.
Squarespace Enterprise and Weglot: Ideal for a multilingual edge
Optimizing a multilingual Squarespace Enterprise website requires a combination of cultural sensitivity, effective design, and content optimization. With this combination, you can create appropriate content and implement an effective design for your brand. Plus, with a full suite of services from content translation to technical SEO expertise, Weglot can supplement your website and help you take your business to new heights—and markets.
