Multi-language site strategy for SGEN
How to plan and run a multi-language site on SGEN
Running your site in more than one language is one of the most impactful things you can do for international reach — and also one of the easiest to get structurally wrong at the start. The decisions you make in the first hour — how your URLs are shaped, how your content is organized, which pages get translated first — follow you for the life of your site. This guide walks through the strategy layer, the thinking before the clicking, and then shows you the concrete steps for building a clean, maintainable multi-language site in SGEN.
SGEN does not ship a built-in plugin that automatically converts your content between languages. Instead, it gives you the structural tools — pages, Custom Objects, URL slugs, per-page SEO fields — to organize and present separate content for each language. That separation is an advantage: machine-translated content frequently reads poorly and ranks poorly in search. Your translated content in SGEN is intentional, human-reviewed, and indexed as its own document by search engines.
The two questions every multi-language project has to answer first are: how will the URL look for each language, and where will the translated content live in your dashboard. This guide answers both, explains the trade-offs, and shows you how Acme Coffee Roasters built a clean English-and-Spanish site with a subdirectory structure that serves both audiences well.
When you finish this guide you will have a working URL structure for your target languages, translated pages with correct SEO metadata, and a language selector your visitors can use to switch between versions. The setup is a few hours of careful work up front that pays off every time a new visitor finds you through a search in their own language.
What is this for?
This guide is for any SGEN admin who needs their site to serve visitors in two or more languages — whether that is a second language for a growing market, a bilingual audience the brand already serves, or a full international expansion. The strategy applies whether you are starting a site from scratch in two languages or adding a second language to a site that already exists in one.
You will use this guide before you create pages or write content, because it shapes the structure you build into. If you have already built a single-language site and are adding a second, this guide also explains how to retrofit a URL structure without breaking your existing pages or their search rankings.
The SGEN features you will use most are: Pages (for content), URL Slugs (for path structure), SEO fields (for per-language metadata), and potentially Custom Objects if your site has structured content like products, menus, or team bios that also need translation. You do not need a special plan tier to run a multi-language site on SGEN — the URL and SEO fields are available on every plan.
One point to set expectations clearly: SGEN manages your content structure, not the translation itself. You bring the translated text — from a professional translator, a bilingual team member, or a carefully reviewed machine-translation pass. SGEN stores it, structures it, and presents it to the right audience.
Good use cases
A multi-language site strategy is the right approach in any of these situations. The examples below all use Acme Coffee Roasters as the primary brand, with sister brands where noted.
Acme Coffee Roasters has been expanding into Latin American wholesale accounts. Their main site is in English. They add a Spanish version — all pages under the /es/ prefix — for their core content: home, about, wholesale, and the product catalog. Their Spanish pages rank separately in search results when cafes in Mexico and Colombia search for specialty coffee.
What NOT to use this for
Multi-language URL structure solves a specific set of problems. It is not the right tool for everything that sounds international.
Showing different prices by URL prefix requires conditional logic on the checkout side, not just different pages. Manually maintaining two price lists on two translated pages is a data-consistency risk — the two versions will drift.
How this connects to other features
Multi-language structure touches nearly every content-producing feature in SGEN.
— Your primary content type for most translated content. Each language version is a separate Page record with its own slug, SEO fields, and content body. The Page editor is where you set the URL slug that determines the language prefix.
Before you start
A few decisions to make before you create a single translated page.
Decide on your URL structure and commit to it before touching anything in the dashboard. The two standard options are subdirectory (yoursite.com/es/) and subdomain (es.yoursite.com). Subdirectories are simpler to manage in SGEN because the URL slug field handles the prefix directly — no DNS changes are needed. Subdomains require DNS configuration and can be harder to consolidate for SEO purposes. For most SGEN sites, subdirectory is the right choice.
Decide which pages to translate first and make a written list. You do not need to translate everything before launching the multi-language experience. Translate your highest-traffic pages first: home, about, your main product or service page, and contact. A four-page translation that is current and correct is far more valuable than a twenty-page translation where half the pages are a version behind.
Pick a naming convention for translated pages in the dashboard before you create any of them. A clear convention saves confusion later. One reliable approach: prefix translated page titles with the language code in brackets. [ES] Sobre Nosotros and
About Us are immediately distinguishable in your Pages list. Use the same convention for every translated Custom Object record and Blog Post.
Confirm you have your translated text ready — or at least a clear plan for where it is coming from — before building the page structure. The structure takes an hour to set up. The translation is where the real time is spent, and having the content ready means you can go from structure to published in a single work session.
Where to go
The Pages area in your dashboard is your primary workspace for a multi-language site build. Go to Pages in the left sidebar. From there, Add New opens the page editor where you set the slug, content, and SEO fields for each translated version.
You will also use the SEO panel in the right sidebar of each Page editor — this is where per-language titles, descriptions, and canonical URLs are set. If your site has Custom Objects that need translation, go to Custom Objects in the sidebar. For navigation, go to Menus under the Appearance section.
Steps — Build your multi-language site structure
The steps below take you from a single-language English site to a working two-language site with Spanish as the second language. Adapt the language codes and slugs for your own target languages — the process is identical regardless of which language pair you are working with.
1. Map your slugs before creating anything
Open your Pages list and note the current URL slugs for every page you plan to translate. Write out a slug mapping — on paper, in a note, anywhere you can reference it while working. For Acme Coffee Roasters, the English-to-Spanish mapping is:
/(homepage) →es/inicioabout→es/sobre-nosotroswholesale→es/mayoreocontact→es/contactoblog→es/blog
The pattern is consistent: the language code (es) becomes the first segment of every translated page's URL slug, followed by a forward slash and the translated page name. You do not configure this prefix anywhere in SGEN settings — you set it by writing it directly into the URL Slug field on each translated page. The forward slash between es and the page name is what creates the subdirectory structure that both visitors and search engines recognize as a separate language tree.
This mapping is your blueprint. Keep it visible while you work through the following steps — it prevents slug errors that are tedious to fix after a page is published.
2. Duplicate your primary-language pages
For each page you want to translate, open the Pages list, find the row for that page, open the actions dropdown (the three-dot or gear icon), and choose Duplicate. A copy of the page is created with all its layout, content, and settings preserved. The duplicate appears in the list with a title like About (copy) and a slug like about-copy.
Rename the title immediately before doing anything else. Change
About (copy) to [ES] Sobre Nosotros. Save the page as Draft. Repeat this for every page in your slug mapping before moving on to content — it is faster to rename everything first than to switch back and forth between renaming and translating.
Duplicating rather than starting from a blank page saves you the work of rebuilding the layout for each language version. You are giving the translator a page that already has the correct structure, heading hierarchy, and section order. If your pages use SG-Builder layouts, the duplicate carries over the full builder layout, styles, and component tree.
3. Set the language-prefixed URL slug
On each duplicated page, open the page editor and find the
URL Slug field in the right sidebar. Replace the auto-generated slug with the language-prefixed slug from your mapping. For the Spanish About page, set the slug to
es/sobre-nosotros.
Save the page as Draft. Check the slug preview below the field — it should show your full domain followed by
es/sobre-nosotros. If the preview shows a hyphen where the slash should be, the slug field interpreted your entry as a hyphenated string. In that case, clear the field, type the value again with a literal forward slash between the language code and the page name, and save again.
Verify the slug looks exactly right before moving on. A slug error at this step means the page will be at the wrong URL when published, and correcting it after publishing can break any links you have already built to that page.
4. Replace the content with the translated text
With the slug confirmed, open the content editor and replace the English text with your translation. Work section by section from top to bottom rather than jumping around — it is easier to confirm nothing was missed when you go methodically.
If you have images with embedded text — banners, infographics, pull-quotes with words in them — those need separate translated versions. Upload your Spanish-language image variants via the
Media area and swap them into the translated page. An English-language banner on a Spanish-language page reads as unfinished and is a credibility problem for the audience you are trying to reach.
After replacing the content, read through the page once in its entirety. Look for any English text that was not replaced: button labels, form placeholders, footer text, or alt text on images. These are easy to miss because they sit outside the main content flow.
5. Set per-language SEO fields in the target language
On the translated page, open the SEO panel in the right sidebar. Three fields matter most for multi-language SEO.
SEO Title — write it in Spanish as a natural search phrase, not a word-for-word translation of the English title. A Spanish-speaking user searching for an artisan coffee roaster types different words than an English-speaking user does. Write for the search behavior of your actual audience, not for translation fidelity.
Meta Description — write a natural description of the page in the target language, under 155 characters. Read it aloud. If it sounds like translated English rather than native prose, rewrite it. Search engine users make click decisions based on the meta description — it should sound like something a native speaker wrote.
Canonical URL — set this to the full URL of the translated page. For the Spanish About page, that is
yoursite.com/es/sobre-nosotros. The canonical URL tells search engines that this is an independent document, not a copy of the English page. Without this field set correctly, search engines may suppress the translated page from results for being too similar to the original.
6. Add a language selector to your navigation
Translated pages are only useful if visitors can find and switch to them. Add a language selector to your site header so users can move between language versions. The selector can be as minimal as two text links (EN and ES) in the top navigation, or as visual as flag icons with full language names.
Build the language switcher in the Menu Builder under Appearance. Create a new menu called Language Switcher with one link per language. Each link points to the home page of that language version: / for English, es/inicio for Spanish. This gives visitors an entry point to each language tree. From there, visitors navigate within the language they arrived in.
Test the language switcher after adding it. Click through it in a private browser window. Confirm every link goes to a live, Published page — not a Draft page, which would show blank or redirect to the homepage.
7. Verify and publish each translated page
Before flipping any translated page from Draft to Published, run through this check for each page individually:
- Confirm the URL slug matches your slug map exactly.
- Confirm the SEO Title and Meta Description are in the target language, not copied from the English version.
- Confirm the Canonical URL is set to the full translated page URL, not the English URL.
- Confirm no English text remains in headings, buttons, form labels, or alt text on images.
- Confirm the page content reads naturally in the target language — not like a raw machine translation.
Once all five checks pass, flip the page Status to
Published and save. Repeat for every page in your translation batch. After publishing each page, open it in a private browser window to confirm the content appears correctly and the language selector links work as expected.
What success looks like
A well-executed multi-language site has clear, measurable outcomes you can verify the same day you publish.
- Your translated pages appear at clean, human-readable URLs —
yoursite.com/es/sobre-nosotros— with no query-string parameters or language codes appended to the end. - Visitors on any page can switch to the equivalent page in the other language with a single click. The language selector is visible in the header on every page.
- Each translated page has its own SEO Title and Meta Description written in the target language. Searching for the topic in the target language on a search engine returns the translated page as a distinct result from the English version.
- Your Pages list in the dashboard is organized and readable. Translated pages use a consistent naming convention — the
[ES]prefix or equivalent — so you can find any translated page at a glance without opening it. - You have a working process for keeping translations current. When the English version of a page changes materially, the translated page gets flagged for update. This discipline is what separates a multi-language site that works from one that quietly degrades as translations drift from their originals.
- A native speaker of the second language can read your translated pages and recognize them as written for that audience — not as the English pages run through a translator.
What to do if it does not work
Multi-language sites have a handful of predictable failure modes. Here is what each one looks like and how to resolve it.
The page is almost certainly still in Draft status. Open the page in the dashboard, check the Status field in the right sidebar, flip it to Published, and save. Refresh the public- facing URL in a private browser window.
Example: Acme Coffee Roasters — English and Spanish launch
Sarah at Acme Coffee Roasters has been building her site in English for two years. She now has twelve published pages and wants to add Spanish to reach wholesale accounts in Mexico and Colombia. She does not have a dedicated translator on staff, so she uses a combination of a professional translation service for the home, about, and wholesale pages, and careful personal translation for the blog posts she wants to reach her Spanish- speaking newsletter audience.
She starts by writing out her slug map: twelve English pages, eight she wants to translate for the first launch, and four she will add in a second wave. She opens the Pages list and duplicates all eight target pages in one session, renaming each immediately with the [ES] prefix. That takes about twenty minutes.
Over the following week she receives the professional translations for her three high-priority pages, translates four blog posts herself, and leaves one lower-traffic page for the second wave. She sets the SEO fields on each translated page in Spanish, sets the canonical URL to each translated page's URL, and verifies each slug.
On launch day she publishes all eight Spanish pages in one pass, adds the ES link to her header menu, and opens each page in a private browser window to confirm they load correctly. Within thirty days she has forty-two new visitors from Spanish- speaking countries and her first wholesale inquiry in Spanish via the translated contact form.