Multilingual Sites

Advanced Content

in case your target group of visitors is spread all over the world and you need to provide your content in different languages, Automad's build in language router lets you easily server different content base on a visitor's locale. Follow the steps outlined on this page to convert your site into multilingual web presence. 

The Site Structure

The first step in creating a multilingual website is to organize your site structure. In Automad, you want to create a structure where each language has its own landing page directly under the homepage. This will make it easier to manage the content for each language and keep things organized.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Go to the Pages section and add a new page for each language you want to support. For instance, you can create pages called “English,” “Français,” “Deutsch,” etc. These will serve as the landing pages for each language.
  2. Give each page any title you like at this stage — since you'll be changing the slugs in the next step, the title here doesn’t affect navigation or URLs. You can focus on whatever naming convention works best for your workflow.

Once you’ve created the pages, you should have a homepage that points to the different language-specific landing pages.

Language Slugs

By default, Automad will automatically generate slugs based on the titles you gave your language-specific landing pages. However, we need to change the slugs to the corresponding language codes (like en, fr, or de) for proper routing.

Here’s how to change the slugs:

  1. Open the settings of each language-specific landing page.
  2. In the Directory Name field (this field represents the page’s slug), change the automatically generated slug to the matching language code. For example:
  3. Make sure each landing page has its unique language code as the slug.

By setting these language codes as slugs, you’re telling Automad that these pages represent different languages, which is essential for proper language routing later.

Routing Languages

Now that you’ve created your language-specific landing pages and configured the slugs, it’s time to enable language routing. This ensures that Automad will handle the routing for your multilingual content based on the language code in the URL.

Here’s how to enable language routing:

  1. Navigate to System Settings in the admin panel.
  2. Look for the Internationalization section.
  3. Find the Language Routing setting and enable it.

Enabling this feature ensures that when someone visits your site with a specific language code in the URL (like www.yoursite.com/en), Automad will automatically serve the content for that language. For example, if someone visits www.yoursite.com/fr, they’ll be redirected to the French language version of the site.

Translating Your Content

At this point, your multilingual site structure is set up, but it’s still empty. Now you’ll need to add translated content to each language-specific landing page. 

Once you’ve added all your content and completed the setup, it’s time to test your multilingual website. Make sure to check:

  • Whether each language-specific page loads correctly when visiting its respective URL (e.g., 
  • That content is displayed correctly in each language and there are no broken links.
  • Navigation and links between languages are working as expected.

Linking To Languages

Now, your multilingual site is ready for visitors. But what if you want to give those visitors the chance to change to another language? With language routing enabled, pages in other languages than the currently active one are not visible in the site navigation and can’t be found in the site search. 

In order to allow visitors to change to another language, we can simply create page for another language that is alias inside the active language. With the three languages used in this tutorial, we can create the page /en/german and forward it to the German landing page by changing the URL field to /de in the page settings. In the case of the Standard Theme, we can finally check the "Show Page in Footer" checkbox to show the link in the footer. This procedure we can also repeat for the French version as well as all remaining combinations inside the other two languages.

Open Graph & Favicons Scripts & Integrations
Publishing
In Automad, changes made to content fields — such as blocks or settings — are saved automatically. These changes are stored as drafts. Signed-in users can see and edit drafts at any time, while public visitors only see content that has been published. This makes it easy to work on content over a longer period without exposing unfinished pages to your visitors.
Global Defaults
One of Automad’s core ideas is the concept of global defaults. Many fields can be set either globally or individually for each page. When a page is displayed, Automad first checks the page itself for a value. If nothing is set there, it falls back to the global data.
Blocks
Blocks are small, self-contained pieces of content such as text paragraphs, headings, galleries, slideshows, and more. You can also add dynamic content like Pagelists, Filelists, or custom snippets. The block editor offers an intuitive editing experience and lets users freely compose a page from multiple blocks.
Layouts
Layouts in Automad are created using the Layout Section block. They can be added anywhere on a page and can contain other Layout Sections, allowing you to create complex, nested designs. Sections can also be set to stretch to the full width of the content area or page. Watch the short videos on this page to see these features in action.
Components
Components in Automad are reusable, static compilations of blocks that let you create consistent sections across your site without having to rebuild them each time. They are ideal for content such as call-to-action elements, card grids, address blocks, or any combination of snippets that should appear in multiple places.