itLatin script

How to translate WordPress to Italian

Italian (Italiano) reaches roughly ~67 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Italian-specific gotchas, and the SEO.

hreflang
it
Native
Italiano
Direction
LTR
Text length
+15% longer than English
Plurals
2 forms
“Welcome”
Benvenuto

What's specific to Italian

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 Italian:

  • Gender agreement affects adjectives and articles — machine output usually handles it, but review key UI strings.
  • Apostrophes are common (l'utente) — ensure they render as typographic, not broken entities.
  • Formality: tu (informal) vs. Lei (formal, capitalized).

Step by step

1. Add Italian as a target language

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

4. Get the Italian SEO right

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

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