Hi Pavlos,
the HTTP redirect has to be enabled at two separate places:
- the feature itself has to be enabled on the MultilingualPress settings page in the network admin;
- for every single site, you have to enable the redirect (when editing the sites, click on the MultilingualPress tab).
Is everything all set? On the Sites list page, you should be able to see a check mark for every site in the Redirect column.
Without seeing the errors that Google gives you, I can’t do much.
What is wrong, according to Google?
What is the nature of the underlying content of the URLs? Is it posts? Also archives? Someting else? Is it paginated content?
Thanks in advance,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten and thanks for your reply.
I have now enabled the redirection on the MultilingualPress settings page and I see see a check mark for every site in the Redirect column. I changed the user language on both chrome and firefox and tried them, it does not redirect. I cleared browser cache as well as the server cache, tried again, nothing changed. Any advice what else to look?
Regards,
Pavlos
Hi Pavlos,
The Language Negotiation depends both on the languages (and quality values) sent by your browser, and the available languages and their individual priority defined in MultilingualPress (on the Language Manager page in the network admin).
You should be redirected (only) when you initially visit a post that is also available in a more appropriate language.
Would you mind providing the different URLs for the languages here so I can check that myself?
Thanks in advance,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten,
Thanks once more for your response. After changing the settings the redirect works but in a strange way, as i said the site supports 18 languages with some still in development mode so that I would like to send the urls in a PM if you do not mind. For example, if you hit the Italian language of the languages menu it redirects to the English home page if the preferred language of the browser is English. Is this suppose the right way to function?
Thanks in advance,
Pavlos
Hi Pavlos,
you can send me the URLs to support@multilingualpress.org, if you want.
Thanks in advance,
Thorsten
Hi Pavlos,
thanks for sending me an email.
Inlining parts of your message here:
For your information, I have unchecked the “http redirect” option on the MultilingualPress settings page in the network admin because no matter what language one would hit in the language menu it would always redirect for example to the English home page, if the preferred language of the browser is English. We do not that function because there are people who still like visit the other channels regardless of the language set in the Brower. The […] web site is getting really big […], so we are really concerned on how to handle automatic language redirection and frankly we are a bit lost on that matter.
To clarify, our main concern is the redirect to take place on the home page based on the language of the Browser… After that no redirect to take place and that to be able from the language menu to choose another language/channel.
The default (and thus expected) behavior is that users will be redirected when they visit your site depending on what their browser sends and what you have to offer.
Whenever a user explicitly clicks a link (generated by MultilingualPress) to some other language than the most appropriate one (meaning the one they were redirected to, if at all) they are, of course, able to see the content in the very language they want to. That language will be stored as noredirect in the PHP session, so users can move around in another language without being redirected over and over again, which would make no sense.
So, what is the problem with this behavior for your site? For what reason did you deactivate the redirect?
Didn’t it work at all?
Had you been redirected for every single request?
What did you use to navigate to another language version? The Language Switcher widget? Menu items? Quicklinks?
If redirection is activated, it should take care of adding the noredirect query argument to all URLs in links generated by MultilingualPress. Was this the case? So, for example, in you Languages menu, all items should have that argument in the URL.
Anything else that might help me understand (and then fix) the problem? π
Thanks in advance,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten,
Thanks once more for your response and the explanation on how redirect works. In my case I had to deactivate the redirect because the navigation (wordpress menu items) to another language would not function as expected. So, I do not use the The Language Switcher widget but ordinary wordpress menu items.
For example, with the redirection activated and the browser language set to English all language menu items (domain.com/es, domain.com/fr, etc) would redircet to home page of the English language (domain.com/en). Is this the expected behaviour?
Thanks in advance,
Pavlos
Hi Pavlos,
no, what you described is not the expected behavior.
What exactly do you mean by ordinary WordPress menu items? Did you add Custom Link menu items? Or did you actually use Language items provided by MultilingualPress? Maybe you have to enable these first in the Screen Options, see here.
When using Language items (which would make a lot of sense), you should have a noredirect query argument in your URLs, and hence no redirection.
Cheers,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten,
Indeed, I do not use the Language items. Instead i provide Custom Link menu items to navigate to another language. So, I guess I have to replace the “custom language menu” of all languages with the Language items provided by MultilingualPress?
Thanks in advance,
Pavlos
Hi Pavlos,
yes, that would help. π
You should also be able to reenable the redirection module again.
Cheers,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten,
I noticed that the query string added from the Language items significantly slow down the loading speed of the web page. Any advice on this matter?
Regards,
Pavlos
Hi Pavlos,
I can’t say exactly what is causing the longer loading time.
Might be that your cache doesn’t kick in with any query arguments in the request/URL.
Adding in the query arguments to the URLs included in the markup itself should not be that much of an overhead.
Cheers,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten and thank you for the great support!
The website usually needs about 1 sec to load, the query string added from the Language items increase the loading to 3-4 sec. I have tried all the query string options of wp-rocket cache plugin as well of cloudflare, there is no improvement. when HTTP Redirect is deactivated then it loads fast again. i guess is the redirection algorithm to add this extra delay, right?
Thank you in advance for all the support.
Regards,
Pavlos
Hi Pavlos,
what happens if you have redirection enabled and visit the first site with a noredirect query arg already? In your case, this would be ?noredirect=en_US.
Is this about 1 second, or about the 3-4 seconds? The last time span is way too large if there is no redirect happening. If you go to the English website and MLP and your browser decide that Greek is better for you, then yes, this will last longer. But only a little as there are no posts fetched, no HTML rendered etc. The redirect happens pretty early.
Thanks,
Thorsten
Hi Thorsten,
You are always there to respond and thank you very much for that! This time the loading time is much better, here is a list with average values:
-HTTP redirection disabled, loading time of home page is less than 1 sec, performance grade 90+
-HTTP redirection enabled, visiting home page with ?noredirect=en_US, loading time is between 2-2.5 sec, performance grade about 80
About the redirection matter, Ξ visited the homepage in different languages, my browser is set to English language, I did not see any redirection happening. But I would say this is not a big issue for me, I like the rest multilingua features of the plugin!
Regards,
Pavlos
