How do I make my Webflow site multilingual?

Add a secondary locale and its subdirectory

Webflow Localization adapts a site by language, or by language and country. The first locale you create is the primary locale, the language you design in. You cannot later promote a secondary locale into the primary one.

A secondary locale starts as a copy of that primary site. If you never translate it, visitors see the same words in both versions. Open the Localize panel, go to Locales, and click Add new locale. Choose a language. Add a country only when you need two versions of the same language, such as English for the United States and English for the United Kingdom. Webflow fills the subdirectory from the language code, such as /es, or from the locale code when a country is set, such as /en-us. You can edit that slug. Choose whether to enable publishing to the subdirectory, click Save, then click Save changes.

Publishing a secondary locale, or adding more than one locale, requires a Localize add-on. You can still translate and review while publishing is off. Only locales with publishing enabled appear in the Locale list element and in the auto-generated sitemap.

Example: an English site adds Spanish, keeps the subdirectory /es, and leaves publishing off until the About page and the main navigation are reviewed. The Spanish homepage will later live at example.com/es.

Translate pages and Collection items

Switch locales from the dropdown in the top bar. On the canvas you can type the translation yourself, or use a translation app. Designers can right-click text and choose Translate to the locale language. Marketers and content editors can select the text and use the globe icon. A whole static page can be translated the same way. On a Collection template, that page command translates the static template text. Item content is translated on the item.

On a paid Localize plan, agentic translation can translate supported text in pages, page metadata, components, and CMS content. One-time mode translates content that is not localized yet and leaves your edits in place when the primary text later changes. Continuous mode updates translations from the primary locale, and it can replace translations your team wrote. Turning agentic translation on does not translate the whole site in the background. Open the page or item in the secondary locale, wait, and read the result before you publish.

The Collection and its fields are shared. Each locale has its own items. A new Spanish item does not appear on the English site. Deleting an item from the primary locale deletes it from every secondary locale. To keep an item only in Spanish, create it there, or set it to draft on the primary locale.

Example: an Events item named 4th of July can be removed from a French (Canada) locale while it stays on the English site. Translating the remaining items does not publish them. Set each locale's publish status on purpose.

Enterprise and Advanced plans can also localize a Collection slug, so a Careers collection at /careers can use /es/empleos. That slug option is part of those plans.

Localize the SEO fields and hreflang

Page settings can differ by locale: page name, slug, SEO title, SEO description, Open Graph title, description, and image, and page custom code. Switch to the secondary locale, open the page settings, and edit. The globe icon can translate the page name, SEO title, SEO description, and Open Graph fields. It does not translate the slug. A slug such as /about can become /acerca if you type it.

Webflow sets the HTML language code from each locale. For search, one signal is enough: page-level hreflang tags, or hreflang in the auto-generated sitemap. You can use either or both. Webflow updates them when you publish. In the Localize panel, under SEO, you can turn automatic hreflang generation on or off. Sitemap hreflang is included when the auto-generated sitemap is on, and only for locale subdirectories with publishing enabled. A custom sitemap does not receive those tags for you. You would add them yourself.

Keep a live primary-locale version of content that also exists in secondary locales. Webflow uses that primary version as the fallback when a visitor's language does not match a specific locale.

Check links, slugs, and routing before you publish

Do not reuse a CMS Collection slug, folder slug, or page slug as a locale subdirectory. If they conflict, the locale wins, and the Collection, folder, or page returns a 404. A page already published at /es will break if Spanish also uses /es.

301 redirects apply to the root domain only. They do not cover localized slugs. If /old-url should reach /new-url in English and in Spanish, add a second rule for /es/old-url.

Navigation should use a Page link or a Collection page link. Those link types can send a visitor to the same page in the locale they are viewing. A link pasted as a full URL stays on that exact path and does not switch locales. If someone opens a page that does not exist in the locale they picked, Webflow sends them to that locale's homepage.

Enterprise and Advanced Localize plans can route the homepage from the visitor's browser language. A locale that includes a country, such as French (Canada), does not receive visitors whose browser is set to French with no country. Those visitors go to the primary locale unless you also add a language-only French locale.

Before you enable publishing, open the secondary locale and check four things. Read one static page and one CMS item. Confirm the SEO title is translated. Click a main navigation link and confirm the address stays under the subdirectory. Confirm that subdirectory is not already a folder or Collection slug.