ruCyrillic scriptHow to translate WordPress to Russian
Russian (Русский) reaches roughly ~255 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Russian-specific gotchas, and the SEO.
What's specific to Russian
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 Russian:
- Cyrillic script — confirm your theme fonts include Cyrillic glyphs or text falls back to a system font.
- Like Polish, plural forms depend on the number — handle counts with the translator, not manual pluralization.
- Formality: ты (informal) vs. вы (formal).
Step by step
1. Add Russian as a target language
Set your source language, then add Russian (ru) 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 Russian 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 Russian under a language-prefixed path like /ru/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator — important for Russian, since Cyrillic characters otherwise become percent-encoded in URLs.
4. Get the Russian SEO right
Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your ru version (with x-default), set <html lang="ru">, 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 Russian 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 Russian to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.