Using Gloty
Languages & URLs
Everything on Gloty → Languages: choosing your source language, adding and activating targets, and deciding what your multilingual URLs look like.
Source language
The source language is the language your site is written in. It is the language Gloty translates from, and it is served at your existing URLs with no prefix — so your current pages, links, and search rankings are untouched.
Set the source language once, before translating. Changing it later does not retranslate existing rows: they were produced from the old source language and will not match the new one. If you must change it, plan on clearing and regenerating your translations.
Target languages
Add a target language from the picker on Gloty → Languages. Gloty supports the standard WordPress locales, listed with their native names — Español, Français, Deutsch, 日本語, العربية, and so on.
Each language row has two independent notions:
hreflang and sitemap alternates.
Deactivating a language keeps its translations in the database but takes it off the front end — useful while you prepare a language you are not ready to launch. The Languages screen shows your source and active languages by default and folds configured-but-inactive ones behind a Show N inactive languages toggle so a long list does not bury the ones you actually serve. Since 1.8.0
How many languages should you add?
Every target language duplicates the translation work: 1,000 source strings across three targets is 3,000 rows and roughly three times the characters against your quota. Start with the languages you will genuinely publish and promote, and add more once the first ones are complete.
URL structure
Set this under URL strategy on Gloty → Languages.
| Mode | Example | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Subdirectory Default | example.com/de/shop/ |
Recommended for almost every site. Clean, shareable, and the structure search engines expect for language variants. |
| Query parameter | example.com/shop/?gloty_lang=de |
A fallback for hosts or configurations where custom rewrite rules cannot be used. Weaker for SEO — prefer subdirectories where possible. |
Subdirectory mode needs pretty permalinks. If your site is still on
plain permalinks, Gloty switches you to
/%postname%/ and flushes the rewrite rules so language
URLs work. Rewrite rules are also refreshed automatically whenever
your active language list changes.
Seeing 404s on a new language? Visit Settings → Permalinks and click Save — that forces WordPress to rebuild its rewrite rules.
What Gloty rewrites for you
-
Post, page, archive, feed, and pagination URLs under a language
prefix —
/de/page/2/,/de/feed/, and so on. - Internal links inside translated content, so a visitor browsing in German stays in German.
- Menu items, including hand-entered Custom Link entries. External links are left alone. 1.4.2
- Absolute internal links that a theme prints directly in its templates and which bypass the normal WordPress URL filters — a links-only pass over the page output catches those. 1.4.3
Translated slugs
Gloty translates the content of a page, not its slug:
/de/about-us/ keeps the source slug. Translated slugs
are a planned future release — deliberately deferred until the
content pipeline is fully stable, because getting slugs wrong
breaks links and rankings.
How a visitor's language is decided
In order of priority:
-
The URL. A language prefix (or
gloty_langparameter) always wins. This makes every language version independently linkable, shareable, and indexable. - A remembered choice. If the visitor previously used the switcher or was redirected, a cookie records it so they are not bounced around on later visits.
- The browser's preferred language, if automatic redirection is enabled — see below.
- Your source language, otherwise.
Automatic redirection by browser language
Since 1.11.0 Enable Visitor redirection on Gloty → Settings to send an arriving visitor to the version of your site matching their browser's preferred language.
It is off by default, and when on it is careful:
- It applies once per visitor and is remembered with a cookie, so a manual choice from the switcher is always respected afterwards and nobody gets caught in a redirect loop.
-
Search engine crawlers are never redirected. Every language URL
stays independently indexable and there is no
Accept-Languagecloaking. - Only plain page views are affected — never wp-admin, feeds, form submissions, or previews.
Turn it on after your languages are live. Redirecting visitors into a language whose pages are still mostly untranslated is a worse experience than leaving them on the source language.
Language attributes and SEO
Every translated page declares the active language in
<html lang>, which matters for screen readers,
browser translation prompts, and search engines. Reciprocal
hreflang tags, per-language canonicals, and sitemap
alternates are handled on the SEO screen.