WPML (WordPress Multilingual) is a paid plugin that makes a single WordPress site available in more than one language. You write your content once, then create translated versions of each page, post, menu item and product, and visitors get a switcher to choose their language.
Think of it like a museum that prints the same exhibit signs in Dutch, English and German. The artwork on the wall is the same, but every visitor reads the label in a language they understand. WPML does that for your site: one WordPress install behind the scenes, several languages out front. It plugs into your existing content management system rather than forcing you to rebuild anything. You can translate in three ways, and the choice matters more than it sounds: do it yourself in the editor, send pages to a translation service through the plugin, or invite a professional translator into a separate dashboard so they never touch the rest of your site.
Where WPML earns its keep is the technical detail most people forget. It generates the right hreflang tags so search engines understand which page serves which country and language. It also translates strings hidden in your theme and plugins, not just the obvious page text. For a webshop, it can run a fully translated checkout and even handle different currencies per region. A Dutch furniture brand we worked with had 400 product pages. Splitting them into English and German by hand would have taken weeks. WPML let one translator work through them in a queue, page by page, without a developer babysitting every step.
At TopDevs we reach for WPML when a client already runs on WordPress and needs to add languages without throwing away their existing build, and we wire up the hreflang and URL structure so the translations rank properly instead of competing with each other.
