idLatin script

How to translate WordPress to Indonesian

Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) reaches roughly ~200 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Indonesian-specific gotchas, and the SEO.

hreflang
id
Native
Bahasa Indonesia
Direction
LTR
Text length
+can be longer (reduplication)
Plurals
No inflection; plural via reduplication (buku-buku)
“Welcome”
Selamat datang

What's specific to Indonesian

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 Indonesian:

  • Simple grammar — no tenses or grammatical gender — so machine translation is generally reliable.
  • Latin script, plain ASCII — the easiest of the large-market languages to support technically.
  • Formality: Relatively flat register; anda for polite you.

Step by step

1. Add Indonesian as a target language

Set your source language, then add Indonesian (id) 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 Indonesian 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 Indonesian under a language-prefixed path like /id/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator.

4. Get the Indonesian SEO right

Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your id version (with x-default), set <html lang="id">, 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 Indonesian 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 Indonesian to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.

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