Case Study: Multilingualism (6 Languages) with WPML + DeepL for School Websites

When a school website suddenly needs to work in German, English, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Russian, it sounds like a simple plugin job at first: install WPML, connect DeepL, done. Spoiler: that’s exactly how projects are created where 1,000 small things start to creak afterwards — from links that always lead back to the German URLs, to completely broken anchor links and mistranslated brand names, to SEO metadata that happily vanishes into the void. For Schloss Torgelow and Kurpfalz-Internat, the goal was therefore not just “multilingual”, but multilingual AND clean. Technically stable, editorially controllable, SEO-compliant, and measurably safeguarded. That requires a certain kind of obsession. More on that in this case study on multilingualism with WPML in a WordPress MultiSite setup.

WPML + DeepL: turbo boost — but only with guardrails

Yes: automated translation via DeepL is a huge accelerator. Especially on large projects with many page types, recurring modules, and hundreds of detail texts.

But: a school website is not a flyer. It is a system of menus, components, templates, SEO fields, media, CTA elements, buttons, forms, navigation, blocks, reusable patterns, and everything content editors touch on a daily basis.

For WPML to translate ‘correctly’ at all, it first needs to be clear:

• Which content gets translated?
• Which content must never be translated?
• How are special cases technically handled before scaling?

Exactly this preparation is the real supreme discipline.

What must not be translated: brand names, anchor links & more

A classic: DeepL does its job and suddenly starts translating things that are identity-defining or must work technically.

Brand names remain brand names

Schloss Torgelow is Schloss Torgelow.
Kurpfalz-Internat is Kurpfalz-Internat.
And a Marc Herz must not become a Marc Heart.

That sounds trivial, but in practice it is crucial — because these terms and peculiarities appear in dozens of places: in body text, navigation, snippets, image data, structured content. Once it becomes ‘Castle Torgelow’ or ‘Kurpfalz Boarding School’, you lose recognizability and consistency (and potentially search intent, too). Although ‘boarding school’ for ‘Internat’ is correct when it appears independently of Kurpfalz.

Don’t touch anchor links

Many modern websites use jump marks (“#bewerbung”, “#internat”, “#kontakt”). If these anchors are changed during translation, buttons, tables of contents, and internal jumps stop working.
Therefore: anchors remain stable — the visible label can be translated… but not the technical mechanism behind it.

SEO metadata & images: ‘translating along’ is not enough

For both projects, not only page content was translated, but consistently also:

• SEO titles & meta descriptions
• Open Graph data
• Alt texts / titles / descriptions of images
• Media SEO, where it makes sense

Important: much of this information does not live “in the content”, but in the SEO plugin — here in the Yoast ecosystem.
This means: you need to ensure that WPML recognizes the relevant fields, passes them correctly, and the translations are served per language. Otherwise the page may look translated, but Google still receives DE metadata. (And that would be… let’s say… suboptimal.)

Components must be WPML-compatible

A WordPress Multisite setup with flexibly combinable sections is brilliant — but only when every component is also built to be “translatable”:

• clean field logic (what is text, what is a link, what is a label?)
• clearly defined string handoff to WPML
• reusable modules without ‘hardcoded’ content
• consistent templates so that translations don’t diverge

In short: you don’t translate pages, you translate building blocks. And when building blocks are cleanly prepared, the whole thing scales even at 1,000+ pages.

Slugs: translated without link chaos and without Cyrillic

On large websites, slugs are not a detail but structure: they are tied to redirects, internal links, rankings, external references, and day-to-day editorial work. In our setup:

• slugs translated sensibly per language
• the link logic built so that the frontend always outputs the correct language URL (without cascading link errors)

Particularly important was Russian: here we did not want Cyrillic slugs, but clean, Latin-transcribed URLs. For this, WordPress (and the slug behavior in conjunction with WPML) must be configured accordingly, so that Russian titles produce ASCII-compliant slugs — technically clean, SEO-friendly, and maintainable in practice.

Fonts & special characters: performance vs. correct typography

Performance is not a “nice to have” in our projects. As an agency we are practically obsessed with achieving green values in PageSpeed for mobile views — i.e. 90+ in PageSpeed Insights. Large font files are among the most common bottlenecks. At the same time: if a website needs to render Turkish and Russian cleanly, the typefaces also need to:

• Turkish special characters rendered correctly
• Cyrillic characters rendered correctly
• not suddenly replaced by system fonts (which is immediately visually noticeable)

In multilingual projects especially, performance issues are frequently reported in the community. And that’s logical: more language files, additional font sets (e.g. for Turkish & Cyrillic), more templates/assets, and often more scripts in the translation setup.

The homepage tested here includes:

• a menu with image content
• a slideshow in the hero area
• 14 more pixel-based images
• a variety of icons and logos
• cookie banner and tracking scripts for Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Google Tag Manager
• a chatbox integration with a pre-recorded video

I want to make it clear that everything is included here that from a performance perspective can easily push values into the yellow or red zone. Our obsession with PageSpeed optimization left no room for compromise, and we improved the codebase and delivery until the values were clean.

Language-localized video greeting in the chatbot — using HeyGen

A nice extra (and a real UX booster) was the language localization of the video-based user greeting in the chatbot: the videos were adapted per language — using an AI workflow and the tool HeyGen. For this, the pronunciation of brand names was also specifically adapted for each language so that, for example, “Schloss Torgelow” is pronounced correctly in Russian and Turkish.

A quote from our client Mario Lehmann: ‘My ladies are greatly amused by their language skills. 😉’ Multilingualism is allowed to be fun — as long as it stays technically clean.

Quality assurance: Seobility as a safety net for large translation projects

With multilingualism, the biggest mistake is: “It’ll probably be fine.” That’s why we consistently secure such projects with a crawl — not just spot-checks, but as part of our quality assurance process.

• Schloss Torgelow: approx. 2,770 crawled pages
• Kurpfalz-Internat: approx. 1,687 crawled pages

This allows typical translation pitfalls to be found and fixed systematically: broken internal links, missing titles, duplicate descriptions, hreflang issues, index errors across language directories.

The result: top scores in on-page quality, and a project that not only “looks multilingual” but also holds up under the hood. Let me put the scores above into context. Achieving over 90% in Seobility is something very few website operators manage with their site when it runs in German only. With six languages and 2,770 and 1,687 subpages respectively, such scores are evidence of relentless discipline in the interest of the client’s project success.

Indexing: fast, clean, and visibly tracked

A highlight was the speed with which Google picked up the new language URLs. In Search Console you can clearly see the progression: after the relaunch at the end of 2025, old Typo3 URLs were quickly phased out. With the release of the new language versions, the number of indexed pages rose swiftly. For Schloss Torgelow, there are currently 2,479 indexed pages. Just under 10% of pages are still missing from the index, but that will certainly happen soon.

That’s exactly what migration with multilingualism should look like: controlled, traceable, without any loss in visibility.

Conclusion: Successful multilingualism remains a supreme discipline

WPML + DeepL deliver speed. Quality is created through preparation, ruleset, and safeguarding:

• clear ‘do not translate’ logic (brand names, anchors, technical strings)
• translatable components instead of page builder chaos
• SEO metadata including Yoast truly multilingual
• Slugs clean, maintainable, without Cyrillic URLs
• Performance & fonts under control
• Crawl-based quality assurance across all language directories

Properly done multilingualism remains a supreme discipline — especially when a website needs to go live not just “translated”, but SEO-strong, accessible, and performant. If you also have a website that needs to be multilingual with WPML (or another system), we would be happy to advise you and take responsibility for the technical implementation — measurably and cleanly.