Multilingual website design: doing it properly

Structure first

Use language folders on one domain (/sr/, /de/) for most service businesses, with hreflang linking every version. The technical side is covered in international SEO.

Language switching

• A visible switcher showing language names in their own language: English, Srpski, Deutsch, Русский.
• Do not use flags for languages; a language is not a country.
• Switching should take the visitor to the same page in the other language, not the homepage.
• Never force a language by IP address; suggest it and let people choose.

Layouts that survive translation

• Text length varies between languages. German, for example, often runs longer than English. Design buttons, menus and headings with room to grow.
• Avoid text inside images; it cannot be translated or read by search engines.
• Support every character set you need, including Cyrillic, and test fonts in each language.

Local details

Content quality

Adapt, do not just translate: local search terms, local examples, local rules. Every page reviewed by a native speaker before publishing. A few excellent pages in a language beat a whole site of machine translation.

Declare the language

Set the correct lang attribute on every page so browsers and screen readers handle the text properly.