One site. Eight languages. One edit changes all of them.
MacLav teaches funded English and Maths courses online, and its learners speak eight different first languages between them. The site was on Joomla, and the job was to move it to WordPress. Two jobs, really. Carry the search rankings across, then build eight languages that stay in step.
Built
WordPress migration in eight languages · awaiting launch
Where it hurt
What we saw
The risk in a site like this is drift: the English pages move on, the other seven fall behind, and keeping them level is somebody's manual job for as long as the site exists. So the eight languages live in the structure. Intake dates, deadlines and contact details are typed on one screen and change in all eight, the switcher sits on every page, and a link keeps a reader in the language they started in. The move off Joomla was handled the same way round: every old address points at its new page, so the rankings and the links people had already saved carried over.
What we did, and why
Map. Every old address to its new page.
Before anything moved, the old site's addresses were catalogued and pointed one by one at where that content was going. It is the unglamorous half of a migration and the half that decides whether years of search rankings survive it.
Build. One structure, eight languages.
A WordPress theme written to the brand, with no page builder underneath it. The eight languages are part of the build rather than a translation layer over it: English, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Hungarian, a switcher on every page, and links that keep a reader where they started.
Hand over. The things that change, in one place.
Intake dates, deadlines and contact details live on one settings screen and update in all eight languages. Enquiries are labelled by area automatically, from a postcode list the team uploads as a spreadsheet, and every one is saved in the site as well as emailed, so a lost email is not a lost enquiry.
The site we built.
For brands like yours
In a multilingual build the languages are a structure problem before they are a translation problem. If the things that change most often (a date, a deadline, a phone number) live in one place, eight languages cost about what one costs to run. If they do not, seven of them go stale and nobody notices until a learner does. The build is complete and not yet live. When it launches, an intake date goes in once and reaches every learner in their own language the same day.
More of our work.
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