fiLatin script

How to translate WordPress to Finnish

Finnish (Suomi) reaches roughly ~5 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Finnish-specific gotchas, and the SEO.

hreflang
fi
Native
Suomi
Direction
LTR
Text length
+30–40% — one of the biggest expanders
Plurals
2 forms, but 15 grammatical cases affect word endings
“Welcome”
Tervetuloa

What's specific to Finnish

Most of translating WordPress is the same in any language, but each language has quirks that break layouts or SEO if you ignore them. For Finnish:

  • Agglutinative with 15 cases — single words get very long (one word can equal an English phrase). Budget generous layout space.
  • No grammatical gender and no articles — machine translation handles this, but review pronoun-heavy UI.
  • Formality: sinä (informal) common; teitittely (formal) exists.

Step by step

1. Add Finnish as a target language

Set your source language, then add Finnish (fi) as a target. With an automatic plugin you don't create a translated copy of every page by hand — it translates on the fly.

2. Translate — automatically or by hand

Machine and AI translation get you Finnish coverage in minutes; review the strings that matter (navigation, calls to action, legal) for the right register. Estimate the cost with the translation cost calculator.

3. Serve it under a clean URL

Publish Finnish under a language-prefixed path like /fi/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator.

4. Get the Finnish SEO right

Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your fi version (with x-default), set <html lang="fi">, and translate titles and meta descriptions. Build the tags with the hreflang generator and verify with the hreflang checker.

Doing it the easy way

Gloty translates your whole site into Finnish automatically with the AI provider you choose, stores it in your own database, and emits the correct hreflang and lang/dir attributes for you. See how it stacks up against Weglot and WPML, or read the pillar guide on making WordPress multilingual.

Add Finnish to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.

Try Gloty free
Go multilingual free
Open source · your data stays yours
Start free