esLatin scriptHow to translate WordPress to Spanish
Spanish (Español) reaches roughly ~490 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Spanish-specific gotchas, and the SEO.
What's specific to Spanish
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 Spanish:
- Inverted opening punctuation (¿ ¡) is required — keep both marks.
- es-ES (Spain) vs. es-MX / es-AR (Latin America) differ in vocabulary and formality.
- One of the largest markets online — worth doing well for SEO reach.
- Formality: tú (informal) vs. usted (formal); some markets use vos.
Step by step
1. Add Spanish as a target language
Set your source language, then add Spanish (es) 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 Spanish 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 Spanish under a language-prefixed path like /es/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator.
4. Get the Spanish SEO right
Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your es version (with x-default), set <html lang="es">, 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 Spanish 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 Spanish to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.