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javascriptphphtmlservermultilingual

What is the best way to make a multilingual site?

I need to make landing page on 2 languages, swapping language by click on the flag.

How I understand, I need to save language state in user's localstorage / cookies.

I see here 3 options:

  • Upload on user machine .json with content on 2 languages. At the opening of page script will check localstorage for availability of lang variable and after it fill page by JS.

  • Save lang variable in cookies, and at appeal to the server, server must make magic and send back page built on user language.

  • Make duplicates of each page in each language.

Question 1:
Which way better, when and why? (cases: one page landing, site with many pages)

Question 2:
When I make duplicates of page, is it normal to have no index.html in root directory at all, but: 

/en/index.html  
/ru/index.html

and .htaccess file that redirect to /en/ by default, check cookies for lang variable, and if exist redirect user to specific folder.

Solution

  • Question 1: Option 1: Good practice if you have some sort of frontend framework (like Angular or React). But if you have a static (or only serverside rendering) page it is not really the way to go. Because it add unnecessary complexity to your code.

    Option 2: Good way to do it if you only have backend rendering (for example with PHP).

    Option 3: Do this only if you have static webpage (only HTML/CSS) which does not change. And you don't have programming experience at all.

    Question 2: Well no you always have a index.html but you can redirect to the index.html of the default language.