How We Handle 17 Languages with WordPress + Polylang: A Technical Deep Dive

#wordpress #webdev #tutorial #multilingual

Running a WordPress site in 17 languages taught us things no documentation covers. Here is what we learned building kkinvesting.io.

Polylang REST API Patterns

Polylang exposes language data through the WP REST API, but it is underdocumented.

# Get all posts in Japanese
GET /wp-json/wp/v2/posts?lang=ja&per_page=100

# Set language when creating a post
POST /wp-json/wp/v2/posts
{"title": "...", "lang": "ja", "translations": {"en": 123}}

Batch Publishing Pipeline

We publish articles in batches: write the source (Traditional Chinese) → translate → localize → publish all languages. Our Python pipeline handles:

Markdown to Gutenberg HTML conversion
Language-specific slug generation
Polylang translation linking
Rank Math SEO metadata per language
Cloudflare cache purging

Hard Lessons

PUT requests get blocked by Cloudflare — Use X-HTTP-Method-Override: PUT header
Rate limit your batch operations — WordPress crashes if you fire too many PUT requests
context=edit is expensive — Use _fields=id,status for lightweight checks
hreflang tags are critical — One mistake and Google ignores all translations

Full tutorials: kkinvesting.io