3.2 million words across an entire website, translated into six languages without writing a single new page.
| Industry | WordPress plugins and software |
| Region | United States |
| Site Type | Plugin website |
| Languages added | Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese (6) |
| Words translated | 3.2 million |
| Platform | WordPress |
Meet SearchWP
SearchWP replaces the default WordPress search with something that actually finds things.
Out of the box, WordPress search only looks at post titles and content. It ignores custom fields, PDFs, documents, product attributes, and taxonomies, which is where much of a real website’s useful information lives. Visitors search, find nothing, and leave.
SearchWP indexes all of it. Site owners get search that returns the right result the first time, plus the data to understand what people are looking for and what they are failing to find.
The Challenge: Millions of Words, One Language
SearchWP has a content-rich website.
Alongside its product and marketing pages, the site contains extensive documentation, including installation guides, integration instructions, developer resources, and troubleshooting content. Altogether, the website runs to 3.2 million words.
All of it was in English.
That content is one of the main ways people discover SearchWP. Somebody’s site search is broken, they type the problem into Google, and a SearchWP page answers it. The website acts as both the top of the funnel and the support desk.
But it only worked for people searching in English. Anyone searching in Japanese, German or Spanish for the same problem had no equivalent SearchWP page to discover because Google had no translated version of the website to show them.
The problem was that the obvious solution was a huge undertaking.
Translating 3.2 million words would normally mean a procurement exercise, a lengthy review process and a permanent maintenance burden. Every website update would become six translation updates.
That is where the idea usually dies.
The Solution: One Installation, Six New Sources of Search Traffic
SearchWP’s website is now live in six languages and ranking in Google across all of them, without anyone rewriting a page or briefing a translator.
The team simply connected its WordPress website to Universally and selected six languages:
- Japanese
- German
- French
- Italian
- Spanish
- Brazilian Portuguese
Context-aware AI handled the translation, helping the copy read naturally rather than like a word-for-word conversion. Documentation, product pages, and marketing pages were all translated together.
Multilingual SEO was built in automatically, including hreflang tags, indexable URLs for each language, and translated metadata.
That last part is the mechanism that matters.
Google can index each translated page as a separate page. Translate a page into Japanese, and it becomes eligible to appear when people search in Japanese. Translate it into German, and it can appear for German-language searches.
Each language gave SearchWP a new set of pages that could be indexed, ranked, and discovered by people searching in that language.
The translations are served through an external layer rather than being written into the WordPress database, so the site did not become heavier or slower.
It required no developers, no code, and no second website to maintain.
From Zero to Rankings in Six Languages
Six languages went live in December 2025.
Before that, SearchWP had no translated search presence for people searching in Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese.
Only a few months later:
Every language is ranking. All six are appearing in Google search results and bringing visitors to the site, rather than sitting unindexed in a folder nobody finds.
Japanese reached an average position of 9.1 across its translated pages. Italian and Brazilian Portuguese followed closely behind, with average positions of 10.4 and 12.1.
The Japanese pages are clicked around twice as often as the site average. Their click-through rate is roughly double the sitewide figure.
That means when SearchWP’s Japanese pages appear in Google, people are particularly likely to choose them. The translations are not only creating more opportunities to be seen. In Japanese search results, they are also attracting a strong response from the people seeing them.
All of it came from content that was already written, already published, and already sitting on the website.
The Reach This Opened Up
Beyond the pages already ranking, six languages dramatically widen the audience SearchWP can serve in its own language.
Based on the total number of speakers across the languages added, more than 1.2 billion people worldwide can now read SearchWP’s website and documentation in their own language:
- Spanish: 559 million speakers across Spain, Latin America and the United States
- French: 310 million speakers across Europe, Africa and the Americas
- Brazilian Portuguese: Roughly 210 million speakers, anchored by Brazil
- German: 135 million speakers across some of the highest-GDP markets in the EU
- Japanese: 125 million speakers in one of the world’s most mature digital economies
- Italian: 68 million speakers across Italy and beyond
Every language SearchWP switched on represents another market its pages can rank in and another audience it can support without employing a translator or maintaining a separate website.
In Their Words
“Going multilingual had been on our list forever but always felt like a project we couldn’t find time for. With Universally it was closer to flipping a switch, and it’s now got SearchWP indexed across six languages, earning roughly 4,000 clicks and 200K impressions from searches we couldn’t touch before. It took a couple of months to build as the pages got indexed, but it’s real traffic we simply weren’t capturing.”
Cristian Rossi, Product Manager
SearchWP
Try It on Your Own Site
SearchWP did not commission a translation project or hire a localisation team.
They translated 3.2 million words of content they had already written, and only a few months later, their pages were ranking in Google across all six new languages.
Universally translates your entire website into 110+ languages with multilingual SEO built in, while keeping your site fast.
Translate your website into 110+ languages today with Universally.
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