Building a multisite or multilingual website: what to consider

Taking your website into more languages or countries means making choices that are hard to undo later. This article explains the difference between a multisite and a multilingual website, which URL structure fits your situation, and how to stay visible in search in every market.

The marketing manager at an international software company needs a press release live in five languages today. Each translation comes back from an outside agency, and someone pastes it into the CMS by hand, one language at a time. The German version goes live days later, and German prospects who search in the meantime find the English page in Google.

What is the difference between a multisite and a multilingual website?

Pick the wrong setup and you usually don't find out until after launch. You end up maintaining the same page five times, or you can't show German pricing without it also appearing on the Dutch site. Switching setups afterward means new URLs, redirects, and a stretch of time where your Google rankings bounce around.

With a multisite, each country or language gets its own website with its own content. You decide per site which pages, products, and news items appear. With a multilingual website, you have one website with the same structure and the same content in several languages. Visitors switch languages and see the same page in their own language.

Which one should you choose?

• Choose a multisite if your offering, pricing, regulations, or campaigns differ by country.
• Choose a multilingual website if you tell the same story everywhere and want to keep content management simple.

A multilingual website can still put a local spin on things. For AMCS Group, we built a feature that lets editors set the relevance of each article per country. Every country sees the same articles, sorted by what matters there, so a local press release doesn't end up at the top of the page in a market where nobody cares about it.

Which URL structure should you use for a multilingual website?

You set your URL structure before a single page goes live. Change it later and you have to redirect every old URL to a new one, with the risk that search engines rank your pages lower for a while. There are four common options.

• Country-code domains (ccTLDs), the top-level domain tied to a country: example.nl, example.de, and example.fr. This sends a strong local signal, though you have to build authority from scratch for each domain.
• Subfolders on a generic domain (gTLD), an extension not tied to any country, such as .com: example.com/nl and example.com/de. All languages share the authority of one domain, and management stays simple.
• Subdomains, such as nl.example.com. Search engines tend to treat a subdomain as a separate website, so the authority you've built doesn't carry over as easily.
• URL parameters, such as example.com?lang=nl. Google advises against this, because search engines have a hard time recognizing the language versions as separate pages.

In practice, we go with country-code domains or subfolders. Subfolders suit an international organization with a single brand. Country-code domains are a better fit if you want a strong local presence or need to be found on search engines other than Google.

Multisite with country-code domains: visible beyond Google

Not every market runs on Google. One of our clients also needed to be found in China, where Google plays no role and local search engines give a lot of weight to a domain with a Chinese extension. For that client, we chose a multisite with its own country-code domain per market, and the team translates and rewrites the content for each country by hand.

A country-code domain tells search engines which country a website targets, which is called geotargeting. Google says a generic domain with strong language signals has the same chance of ranking, yet in Dutch search results we notice .nl domains at the top surprisingly often, especially for local searches where someone is looking for a service provider nearby. For local SEO, a country-code domain can work in your favor.

How do you make sure Google shows the right language version?

A German prospect who searches for your service and lands on the English page is more likely to leave. Without clear signals, a search engine can't tell which language version belongs to which visitor, and translated pages may even compete with each other. Three technical settings give search engines that information:

• Hreflang, a tag in the code that lists which language and country versions of a page exist. Each version points to all the other versions and to itself, for example nl-NL, de-DE, and en-US.
• An x-default, the version visitors see when there is no matching language. This is often the English version or a language selection page.
• A canonical tag per language, which tells search engines that each language version is the original. If a German page points to the English version as its canonical, it disappears from German search results.

Also avoid redirecting visitors automatically based on their IP address. Search engines often crawl from the United States and would only ever see the English version. A clear language switcher works better for visitors and search engines alike.

Translating: by hand, with a plugin, or with AI?

Translating by hand through an agency produces strong copy, but every new page then waits days for all its languages. Machine translation is fast, but it ignores search behavior: a German user often searches for different terms than the literal translation of your Dutch keyword.

Translation software has improved a lot in recent years. DeepL and Azure Translator deliver usable translations and integrate well with a custom Umbraco website. Translating directly from the CMS saves editors from copying and pasting between systems.

We combine the best of both. AI produces the first draft, a native speaker reviews it, and for your most important pages you do separate keyword research per market. That way you get the speed of automatic translation and the visibility of copy written for that market.

How we approached it for AMCS Group

AMCS Group serves clients around the world and regularly publishes news that needs to go live quickly in every language. Having each article translated by hand took too much time.

We chose a single multilingual website with subfolders on a generic domain, so all language versions share the authority of one domain. A translation integration in the CMS translates new content automatically, and native speakers review the text before it goes live. Editors also indicate for each article which countries it is relevant to.

The new website brought AMCS Group 125% more demo requests. Read how we got there in the AMCS Group website case. As an Umbraco Gold Partner, we build multilingual websites and multisites on a custom Umbraco platform, with one dedicated point of contact who knows your markets.