Translate your entire website in a few clicks
Going multilingual used to mean plugins, exported strings and a translation-agency invoice. Here is how to put your whole site in another language at the edge — in about the time it takes to make coffee.
You can serve your existing site in a new language without touching your codebase. The CDN translates pages on the way out, caches the result, and gives each language its own clean URL so search engines treat them as real pages. Setup is a dropdown and a save button.
Most people put off translating their website for the same reason they put off doing their taxes: it sounds like a weekend of tedious, fiddly work that you'll probably get wrong. And historically, they were right.
The classic approach goes something like this: install a translation plugin, watch it slow your admin panel to a crawl, export a few thousand "strings", send them off, wait, paste them back, then discover that half your buttons now overflow their boxes because German words are roughly the length of a CVS receipt. We wanted something less painful.
The old way of going multilingual (and why it hurts)
Traditional localization happens at the application layer. Your CMS has to know about every language, store a copy of every page, and render the right one per request. That works, but it means more plugins, a bigger database, slower admin, and a maintenance job that never really ends.
What you actually want
- Your site, in another language, fast
- Clean URLs Google can index
- No new plugins fighting your stack
What the plugin route gives you
- Heavier admin and database
- Re-exporting strings on every change
- Layout breaking on long translations
What "translate at the edge" actually means
Here's the idea. Your origin server keeps serving exactly one version of your site — the one you already have. When a visitor asks for the French version, the request hits the nearest edge server, which fetches your page, translates the visible text on the fly, rewrites the internal links so they keep the language prefix, and hands back a fully French page. Then it caches that French page, so the next French visitor gets it instantly.
Because the translated page is cached, the translation cost is paid once, not on every visit. The second visitor in a language is just a normal cache hit — the same blazing-fast response as any other cached page.
Setting it up
Turn on translation for your zone
In your dashboard, open the zone, flip the translation toggle, and pick the languages you want to offer.
Choose how URLs look
Path mode gives you example.com/fr/. It's the friendliest option for search engines and for humans copying links.
Save, and let the edge warm up
The first visitor in each language triggers the translation; everyone after that gets the cached copy. That's it — no export, no paste.
A nice side effect: because translation happens at the edge, it covers your whole site — landing pages, blog, product descriptions — without you having to mark anything up as "translatable".
But what about SEO? (the part everyone gets wrong)
This is the question that matters, because a translated site that Google can't see is just a fancy toy. The trick is giving each language a real, crawlable URL and telling search engines how they relate. Path-based URLs do exactly that, and pair naturally with hreflang tags so Google serves the French page to French searchers and the English one to everyone else.
| Approach | Indexable? | Shareable links? | Recommended |
|---|---|---|---|
Path: /fr/ | Yes | Yes | ✓ |
Query string: ?lang=fr | Patchy | Yes | — |
| Cookie / JS switch only | No | No | — |
Done right, you're not just adding languages — you're adding dozens or hundreds of new indexable pages targeting search terms in those languages. That's the part that quietly grows your traffic over the following months.
What it costs you in performance
Almost nothing, once the cache is warm. The first hit per language pays the translation cost; every hit after that is a normal cached response. In practice your French visitors get the same speed as your English ones.
Going multilingual doesn't have to be a project. Turn it on, pick your languages, keep path-based URLs for SEO, and let the edge cache do the heavy lifting. Your site reaches more people in more places, and your origin never even notices.
Want to see it on your own site? Spin up a zone, flip the translation toggle, and watch your homepage come back in another language a second later. It's the rare feature that's actually more fun than it sounds.
Mads has worked in IT — mostly hosting — since he was 16. He took an early stake in a SaaS company and helped grow it through to its acquisition by Visma, has built and run data-center networks, and served as CTO of a Danish data center. He started NordicCDN to make fast, secure infrastructure simple to use.
