Hreflangly answers
Every answer below is aimed at a question people measurably search for, is written from named sources, and links to the page that handles the job itself. None of them is a landing page in disguise.
Every guide here answers one question somebody who owns a multilingual website actually types, and every one of them ends at the same two worksheets: the hreflang canonical map, which counts the tags your pages and locales need, and the website translation scope sheet, which turns your page and word counts into the number a translator can quote against.
- Multilingual website: the structure that holds up, and examples worth copying
How a two-language site differs from a four-language one, which structures hold up, and what to copy from sites that do it well.
- Subdomain vs subfolder for language versions: one decision, made once
The URL structure choice for a multilingual site: subdirectories, subdomains or country domains, and why it is hard to change later.
- Language switcher: what a language selector has to do, and the three ways it usually annoys people
How to build a language switcher that keeps the reader on the page they were on, and why auto-redirecting is worse than it looks.
- How many words are in a page, and how to turn that into a translation quote you can trust
How to get an honest average word count for a site's pages, what to count once, and how the number becomes a translation quote.
- Best website translation: how to judge the tools against your own site rather than against a feature table
How to judge website translation tools against your own pages and locales, with three named products and what each is judged on.
- Localization of website pages, locale by locale
What localising a website involves once the translating is arranged: the pages, the locales, the tags and the record of what is current.
- Website localization how to: the order of work that survives a real site
The order to do a website localisation in, from scope to tags to the record, and the practices that hold up after launch.
- Human translation vs machine translation: which pages each is right for
How to split a site's pages between machine translation, post-edited machine output and human translation, and what each costs.
- Hreflang sitemaps: the tags in XML instead of the head
When to put hreflang in a sitemap instead of the page head, what the XML has to contain, and the practices that keep it correct.
- Hreflang x default: which page catches the readers none of your locales match
What x-default is for, which page should carry it, and when a multilingual site genuinely needs one.
- Ecommerce localization: what ecommerce translation has to cover beyond the product pages
What a store has to localise beyond product copy: currency, sizes, shipping, checkout and the pages nobody remembers.