WPCasa is a cool plugin for WordPress real estate websites and provides the technical infrastructure for property data. Now, the situation on the property market shows that more and more agents want to offer their real estate listings also in other countries. Consequently, they have to make sure their immo websites are available in the corresponding languages.
The WPCasa team was aware of the need and started looking for the best solution in the WordPress plugin world. There are various plugins that help to provide content in multiple languages, such as: wpml or multilingualpress. But after spending a while looking for the best plugin, the WPCasa team came across Polylang and liked what it offers.
Dive Into Polylang
The plugin provides the infrastructure to create content in multiple languages. It is very important to understand that Polylang does not translate content itself. In other words, Polylang gives you the technical possibility to show content in different languages, but the content has to be translated separately.
No matter what you want to have available, the plugin allows you to display the following elements multilingual:
- posts
- pages
- media
- categories
- tags
- custom post types
- custom taxonomies
- widgets
- navigation menus
- URLs
WPCasa And Polylang
Of course, it was very important for us to have real estate specifications available within Polylang. Said and done! You can display different immo data with our add-on WPCasa Polylang, such as listings, location and so on.
No need to say that both plugins work perfectly together and are 100% compatible.
Make It Work
First of all, you need to have a WordPress website in order to use WPCasa. Once WPCasa is installed you have to get our free add-on WPCasa Polylang. This is the only way to ensure that everything works correctly.
We have prepared a documentation for you, where you can check out how to set up Polylang. You can also find some demo examples here.
Even though there is a free Polylang version available, that works perfectly fine with WPCasa, we recommend to use the Polylang Pro version. Let’s see why, just to name a few:
Copy content
The Pro version offers the ability to automatically copy content between languages. In other words, you can duplicate posts across languages.
Shared slug in the URL
This is very important, especially for SEO. Let us explain what this means by using the example “location”, like Madrid. City names are usually identical in all languages. So, in English the slug for the city Madrid would be “domain.tld/location/madrid“. Now, you want to translate your real estate website into German. Without the Pro version the slug would be “domain.tld/standort/madrid-2“. The system adds a number to distinguish the location. This situation is a bit confusing for Google & Co. So, with the Pro version the slug is shared and you get rid of the numbers behind the URL, even if the title is identical.
Enable or disable languages
As we all know, it takes time to prepare a website in another language. You don’t just have to translate the description of your property, but also a lot more like website content, meta data for images, contact forms and so on.
It is important o make sure that the new language is not available before it is completely translated. Otherwise, only parts of it will be in the correct language on your website and that is not really a good first impression. That’s why Polylang Pro allows you to disable the new language. So, you have time to add the translation step by step. Then you can enable the language when the whole content and the properties are completely translated.
Polylang Performance
We all know that performance is everything these days. Here is what our friends from Polylang has to say about their outstanding performance:
“High performance
Polylang doesn’t use any extra tables and doesn’t rely on shortcodes which are long to evaluate. It only uses WordPress’ built-in core features (taxonomies). And thus doesn’t require a lot of memory or harm the performance of your website. Moreover it is compatible with most cache plugins.”
All in all, both plugins, WPCasa and Polylang, are easy to use and work perfectly together. In other words they are 100% compatible.