A client asked me last quarter why their Nexter site looked perfect in English and fell apart the moment WPML switched it to German: the header menu wrapped onto three lines and a hero button lost its label entirely. The fix took an afternoon once I knew where to look. This is the checklist I now run on every multilingual Nexter build so nobody has to find that out the hard way.
What You Need Before You Start
WPML, short for WordPress Multilingual Plugin, is a paid plugin with its own licensing tiers separate from Nexter. The Multilingual Blog tier covers posts and pages; the Multilingual CMS tier adds custom post types, custom fields, and e-commerce, which matters if a Nexter build uses Nexter Blocks’ dynamic content features or WooCommerce templates in more than one language. Before installing anything, confirm which tier the project actually needs. A blog-only multilingual site can run on the cheaper Blog license; a site with dynamic archives, custom fields, or a WooCommerce catalog needs the CMS tier or those elements simply will not have a translation interface.
Budget for translation itself too, separate from the plugin license: WPML offers professional human translation through its own marketplace at a per-word rate, and it also supports pulling in your own translators or a freelance agency through the same Advanced Translation Editor interface. Machine translation is available as a first draft inside the editor, but treat it as a starting point for a human editor to correct, not a finished translation to publish directly, especially for anything customer-facing like checkout copy or legal pages.
On the Nexter side, there’s no special multilingual edition of the theme or plugin to buy. Nexter Theme and Nexter Blocks both run on standard Gutenberg block markup, and WPML’s own String Translation and Advanced Translation Editor modules read that markup the same way they read core WordPress blocks. That compatibility is what makes this walkthrough possible without a dedicated integration plugin.
Also Read: Nexter Theme Header Builder before you start translating, since header structure decisions are easier to make in one language first.
Installing and Configuring WPML on a Nexter Site
Install WPML the normal way, through the plugin’s own installer, since it isn’t distributed through the WordPress.org repository. Run the setup wizard and pick the languages the site needs; WPML defaults the original content language to whatever the site is already in, which for most Nexter builds is English. Resist the urge to add every language you might eventually want. Each active language duplicates the translation workload across every page, block, and menu, so start with the languages that actually have committed content, and add more once the first translation is live and stable.
Once languages are set, WPML asks how translated URLs should be structured: a subdirectory (/de/), a subdomain (de.), or a separate domain per language. A subdirectory is the simplest choice for a Nexter site and the one that plays best with a single WordPress installation, since it needs no extra DNS or hosting configuration.
Translating Nexter Theme Templates and Global Blocks
Nexter Theme’s header, footer, and archive templates are built as reusable template parts, and WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor picks these up as translatable content once you enable translation for the Template Parts post type in WPML’s Translation Management settings. This step is easy to miss, since it isn’t enabled by default the way regular posts and pages are, and skipping it is the single most common reason a translated Nexter site still shows an English header on every other-language page.
Global blocks, the reusable Nexter Blocks elements you drop into multiple pages, need the same explicit opt-in. Translate the source global block once, and WPML keeps every page that references it in sync across languages, so a copy update only needs to happen in one place per language rather than on every page that uses it.
Translating Nexter Blocks Dynamic Content
This is where the Multilingual CMS tier earns its higher price. Nexter Blocks widgets that pull from custom fields (ACF, Meta Box, or Nexter’s own dynamic content sources), from custom post types, or from WooCommerce product data all need CMS-tier support to expose those fields to the Advanced Translation Editor. On the Blog tier, those fields simply won’t appear as translatable, and the block will silently keep showing the original-language value no matter what language the visitor is on.
Forms and call-to-action button text inside Nexter Blocks translate the same way as any paragraph block: WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor reads the block’s saved attributes and offers each text string as its own translation field. The one field worth double-checking after translation is any button’s accessible label or aria-label attribute, since it’s easy to translate the visible button text and miss the attribute WPML doesn’t always surface automatically.
Also Read: WPML vs Polylang vs TranslatePress if you haven’t committed to WPML yet and want the plugin-choice comparison first.
Language Switcher Placement in the Header Builder
WPML ships its own language-switcher widget and shortcode, and the cleanest place to add it on a Nexter site is directly inside the Nexter Theme Header Builder, next to the main navigation or inside a header utility row. Add it as a shortcode block or, if a menu-based switcher fits the design better, WPML can also inject the switcher as a native menu item inside any WordPress menu the header builder is already using. Either approach avoids a custom widget area and keeps the switcher inside Nexter’s own responsive header logic, so it collapses into the mobile menu the same way the rest of the header does instead of needing its own separate mobile behavior.
Multilingual SEO for Nexter Sites
WPML automatically generates hreflang tags linking each translated page to its counterparts in other languages, which is the signal search engines use to serve the right language version to the right searcher. That part is close to automatic. What still needs manual attention is the URL slug for each translated page: WPML defaults to keeping the same slug across languages unless you explicitly translate it, and a German page living at /de/about-us/ ranks worse for German search terms than one translated to /de/ueber-uns/. Translate slugs for any page that’s meant to rank on its own in that language, not just the visible page content.
Rank Math, which handles SEO meta on Nexter sites, needs its own title and description written per language rather than inherited from the original. WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor exposes Rank Math’s meta fields alongside the regular content fields once WPML’s SEO integration is active, so there’s no separate plugin needed to translate meta titles and descriptions specifically.
Common Multilingual Pitfalls
The header-wrapping problem from the intro traces back to text expansion: German, Finnish, and several other languages routinely run 20 to 35 percent longer than the equivalent English string, and a header nav built with just enough room for English labels breaks under that expansion. Test the header and any fixed-width button in the longest language the site supports before calling a translation finished, not just in the shortest one.
A second recurring issue is caching. Full-page and CSS caching plugins that aren’t explicitly multilingual-aware sometimes serve a cached English page fragment to a non-English URL, especially on the header and footer template parts that WPML treats as shared translatable objects. Confirm the site’s caching plugin has WPML compatibility documented, and clear the full cache, not just a single URL, after any template-part translation.
Right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew need a third pass entirely. WPML flips the page direction automatically when an RTL language is added, but Nexter Blocks elements with manually set left or right alignment values, rather than logical start or end values, don’t flip with it, and end up visually mirrored in the wrong direction. Check every block with custom spacing or alignment settings specifically on the RTL version rather than assuming the automatic flip covers it.
Also Read: Local SEO for WordPress for how language and location signals work together once a multilingual site also targets specific regions.
Testing a Translation Before You Publish
WPML’s Translation Management dashboard shows every string’s status: needs translation, in progress, or complete, and that dashboard is the fastest way to catch anything left in the original language before a translated page goes live. Don’t rely on spot-checking a handful of pages by eye. A site with a header, footer, and a dozen global blocks can easily have thirty or forty translatable objects, and the dashboard is the only view that shows all of them at once rather than one page at a time.
Before flipping a translated language live, load every template part (header, footer, any sidebar) and every page that uses a global block on the new language’s front end, not just the WordPress admin preview. WPML’s admin preview doesn’t always render Nexter Blocks’ front-end CSS the same way the live theme does, and text-expansion issues in particular only show up correctly once the real theme stylesheet is loaded. A five-minute pass through the live front end, in the actual language, catches problems that a preview pane misses.
A Realistic Build Timeline
For a typical small-business Nexter site with 10 to 15 pages, budget roughly a day for WPML setup and template-part translation enablement, a day or two per additional language for content translation depending on whether it’s done in-house or through WPML’s built-in translation services, and a half-day for the front-end testing pass described above. A second language on a straightforward site is realistically a three to four day project the first time through, and considerably faster on repeat builds once the template-part and global-block setup steps are familiar.
Suggested Reading
- Nexter Theme Header Builder: Building a Sticky, Transparent, or Mega-Menu Header
- WPML vs Polylang vs TranslatePress
- Local SEO for WordPress
- Nexter Theme vs Astra: Which Should You Build On in 2026?
Does WPML work with Nexter Theme out of the box?
Yes. Nexter Theme and Nexter Blocks both save content as standard Gutenberg block markup, which WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor already knows how to read, so no separate compatibility plugin or integration layer is needed.
Do I need WPML Multilingual CMS or just the core plugin?
If the site only translates posts and pages, the Multilingual Blog tier is enough. If any Nexter Blocks widget pulls from custom fields, custom post types, or WooCommerce product data, the site needs the Multilingual CMS tier, since only that tier exposes those fields to the translation editor.
How do I translate Nexter Blocks dynamic content?
Enable translation for the relevant custom fields or custom post types in WPML’s Translation Management settings first. Once enabled, those fields appear in the Advanced Translation Editor the same as any other translatable content, and Nexter Blocks widgets referencing them will pull the translated value automatically on each language version.
Is RTL supported with Nexter Theme and WPML?
WPML handles the automatic page-direction flip for RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew. Blocks with manually set left or right alignment, rather than logical start or end values, need a manual check on the RTL version, since those specific settings don’t flip automatically with the rest of the page.
