Complete Guide to How to Change the Language on Your WordPress Site – WordPress is a platform that supports many languages and almost all languages around the world, this is because many volunteers want to translate the language on WordPress to support all languages from various countries. With this language feature, it will be easier for WordPress users to understand when operating WordPress in accordance with the language mastered, because by default the language used by WordPress is English.
Likewise with Indonesian, WordPress supports Indonesian and even supports Javanese very well and is always updated by a translation team who is directly from developers and non-developers from native Indonesians so that the translated language is of good quality and is easy to understand. You can see who are the people who volunteer to translate WordPress so that it supports Indonesian here ⇒ Indonesian Translator Team .
Now let’s get into the main discussion which is a complete guide on how to change the language on your WordPress site.
Method 1: Change the WordPress language via the WordPress admin
The easiest way to change your WordPress language is to do it on the ‘General Settings’ or ‘General Settings’ page, but keep in mind that this will change the language for the front and back of your website. Continue to the third section if you only want to change it.
The trick is to go to your WordPress admin and open the Settings »General menu. Scroll down until you see the setting for ‘Site Language’. Select the language you want to use from the drop down menu, for example you select ‘Bahasa Indonesia’, and click the ‘Save Changes’ button to save changes.
Method 2: Change WordPress Language via cPanel
This second method is a little more complicated but the result will also be the same as the method above, namely by directly adding the language to your website directory. You can get files for various languages that WordPress supports here ⇒ Download Languages .
As I explained above that this language file was developed by a large team of volunteers, so it is always updated. Scroll down the list until you find the language you want to install. Make sure the language is compatible with the version of WordPress that you are using. You can see which language file versions are compatible by looking at the Version column.
Basically, languages marked in green are compatible with the latest version of WordPress, which should work fine on your WordPress site. Languages marked yellow or red mean the file is out of date or has not been updated.
Make sure you back up your site before installing for un-updated language files, although it would be in your best interest not to install them at all.
Make text notes in the WP Locale column. For example, Indonesian has the WP Locale code of id_ID . The “id” part is the language code for the “Indonesian language” part, and “ID” is the country code for “Indonesian”.
Read: Making WordPress Multilingual Website Easier with Weglot
Uploading Language Files to Your WordPress Site
Click on the language you want to install on your site, and download the file to your computer using the ‘Download WordPress in English’ button on its individual page. Extract the ZIP folder on your computer, and open the WordPress folder inside.
Open the wp-content folder, and open the ‘Language’ folder.
Go to the root directory of your site through your hosting (File Manager in cPanel) or an FTP client , such as FileZilla (PC / Mac) or Cyberduck (Mac).
Open the wp-content folder in your site directory, create a new folder in it, and give the name “language”. Open the folder when done.
Go back to the ‘Language’ folder you opened on your computer, and upload all the files ending in (.mo) and (.po) to the ‘Language’ folder you created in your site directory. Refresh your file manager when done.
Activating the file in your wp-config.php file
Open your site’s wp-config.php file, and add this line of code to it:
define ('WPLANG', 'id_ID');
Change “id_ID” with the code you will find in the WP Locale column for the language you want to use if you want to use a language other than Indonesian. Save the file, and refresh your file manager.
Read: GTranslate – Easy Solution for Creating Multilingual Websites
Using Different Languages for Frontend and Backend
If you want to use a different language for the frontend and backend of your WordPress site, follow the instructions in the previous section.
When finished, open your site’s wp-content folder followed by the theme folder you are using, then find and open the functions.php file in it.
Add this filter code to it:
add_filter(‘locale’, ‘wpse27056_setLocale’);
function wpse27056_setLocale($locale) {
if ( is_admin() ) {
return ‘en_US’;
}
return $locale;
}
This changes the language displayed in the WordPress admin to the US English version. You can use the language table found on the polyglot page and find the language of your country and country code, and replace it with the language you want to use.
Read: ConveyThis Translate – Plugin to translate your WordPress website .
And that’s a complete guide on how to change the language on your WordPress site, I hope this article was useful for you and good luck. 🙂
