Ukrainian, English, Hungarian — one Polylang Pro install replaced three WordPress sites and a Google Docs translation chain.
Carpathian Daily had three WordPress sites: one Ukrainian, one English, one Hungarian. Every article was written first in Ukrainian, copy-pasted into a Google Doc, translated by two freelance translators, then pasted back into the English and Hungarian sites with whatever formatting survived the trip through Docs.
Average time from Ukrainian draft to all three languages live: 40 minutes per article. At 12-15 articles a week, that ate one full editor-day every week on copy-paste alone.
Search Console showed 314 hreflang errors and 600+ “alternate page with proper canonical tag” warnings. Half the Hungarian articles were ranking below their Ukrainian counterparts on Hungarian queries because the translations went live 2-6 hours later and Google had crawled the Ukrainian version first. LCP on mobile: 4.8 seconds. Hungarian-edition bounce: 78%.
The previous developer had recommended keeping three sites because “WordPress isn’t really multilingual”. That advice was 10 years old.
One WordPress install. Polylang Pro for language management. Custom theme on Sage 10 with Tailwind. Hosting moved from a $7 cPanel shared plan to Cloudways DigitalOcean ($26/mo) with Bunny CDN ($5/mo on top).
The interesting work was the editorial layer. We built a small custom plugin called Linkbridge that does three things:
pending review, Linkbridge auto-creates linked drafts in English and Hungarian, pre-fills the translation via DeepL API, and pushes a Slack notification to the translators with deep-link to the side-by-side editor.hreflang is auto-generated from Polylang’s term relationships and injected into <head> on every page. NewsArticle schema is emitted per language with the correct inLanguage property. RankMath handles meta titles and descriptions per translation rather than falling back to the Ukrainian original.
Build time: 10 weeks. Migration of 4,200 existing articles ran in batches over a weekend on a staging environment, with manual spot-checks on the top 200 articles by traffic.
Time from Ukrainian draft to all three languages live: 40 minutes to 3 minutes. The DeepL pre-fill plus side-by-side editor turned the translators’ work from “start blank, paste, format” into “edit a draft”. Translation cost per article dropped from $14 to $6.
Organic sessions per month, six months pre/post: 11,200 to 23,400 (+109%). The Hungarian edition alone went from 1,800 to 6,100. Hreflang errors in Search Console: 314 to 0 within two weeks of launch.
Mobile LCP: 4.8s to 1.4s. Hungarian-edition bounce: 78% to 51%. Editorial team stopped having Friday “catch-up the translations” sessions because the queue cleared itself by Thursday afternoon.
We had three sites and a chaotic Google Doc. The thing the team built feels boring in the best way — articles in Ukrainian show up in English and Hungarian almost while I’m pouring coffee. The Friday catch-up sessions stopped. Our Hungarian readers stopped emailing complaints about missing stories.
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