The ability to search in WordPress content is something that is included in the core of the CMS and mandatory once you have a website with a large amount of content. Happy for us, that’s the case in the major part of multilingual websites 🙂
That’s when Lingiuse multilingual search will come into play.
The state of multilingual search on WordPress
WordPress is the most used CMS on the market and contains various content from various plugins like e-Commerce products, event in an agenda, file in file manager. This is sometimes native WordPress custom post types that needs to be integrated with the default search engine.
And when content is NOT a custom post types, it requires custom queries in databases; therefore it becomes tricky to handles all the plugins…
This problem also applies to classic translation plugin that uses the WordPress database to store content like WPML or Polylang. Here’s a classic search plugin with integrations mentioned.
Multilingual search queries with Linguise plugin
Now how is it working with the Linguise plugin for WordPress content search?
With Linguise, the multilingual translated content is stored in a separated database (in some case with a local cache), but the thing is that database of translations is centralized on our servers. The SaaS model changes everything as it becomes pretty easy to run global queries on translated content like apply an exclusion rules on the whole content for example. Search queries are then made possible without any custom integration from 3rd party plugins.
Since the 1.6 version, we’ve implemented the possibility to activate search queries in multilingual content. This is just a setting to switch to activate the feature.
The content search can be run in every language, here’s an example in French on our demo website:
Follow the WordPress multilingual search from the dashboard
You may already know if you’re a Linguise user that all your translations can be visualized end edited either from the frontend or the dashboard. This is also the case for the search queries.
Search queries are listed here, so you can check what are the queries content and their search volume:
What about disabling the multilingual search?
The multilingual search feature is not enabled by default in the plugin on purpose, and that’s because the multilingual search queries are consuming a bit of translation quota. Usually, that not a big deal but depending on the website it can be, imagine a website based on an internal search engine, you may want to check first.
So if you chose to keep the search OFF, the search query will still be possible of course, but when your website is in French for example, you’ll need to search the term in English. The content that matches in French will be returned properly.
