Universally Documentation

Step-by-step guides, multilingual SEO tips, and best practices to help you translate and scale your WordPress website.

Multilingual SEO metadata

Universally automatically translates and adapts all SEO-critical elements of your pages for each target language. No additional configuration is required — everything described below happens automatically on every translation request.

What Gets Translated

Page Content

All visible text content on the page is extracted and translated, including:

  • Headings, paragraphs, lists, links, buttons, and all other text elements
  • Form placeholders and accessibility labels (placeholder, aria-label)
  • Image alt text and title attributes
  • Button values for input[type="submit"], input[type="reset"], and input[type="button"]

Meta Tags

The following metadata is automatically translated:

  • <meta name="description"> — the page description shown in search results
  • <title> — the page title shown in browser tabs and search results

Open Graph Tags

Social sharing metadata is translated so links shared on social media show the correct language:

  • og:title
  • og:description
  • og:site_name
  • og:image:alt

Twitter Card Tags

  • twitter:title
  • twitter:description
  • twitter:image:alt

Schema.org Metadata

Both <meta itemprop> tags and JSON-LD structured data are translated:

Meta itemprop tags:

  • itemprop="name"
  • itemprop="description"
  • itemprop="headline"
  • itemprop="alternativeHeadline"
  • itemprop="articleBody"
  • itemprop="caption"

JSON-LD structured data (<script type="application/ld+json">):

  • name, description, headline, alternativeHeadline
  • articleBody, caption, text, abstract
  • award, slogan, alternateName

This ensures that rich search results (recipes, products, articles, FAQ, etc.) display in the correct language.

HTML Attributes

Language Attribute

The lang attribute on the <html> tag is automatically updated to match the target language (e.g., lang="fr" for French).

Text Direction

For right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.), the dir attribute is automatically set to rtl on the <html> tag.

URL Localization

Internal links on translated pages are automatically rewritten to point to the translated version. For example, a link to /about on a French-translated page becomes /fr/about (or the equivalent based on your URL structure).

This includes:

  • Navigation links
  • In-content links
  • Breadcrumbs
  • Any <a href> pointing to pages on the same domain

Links excluded from localization (configured in your project settings) are left unchanged.

What Is NOT Translated

The following are intentionally excluded from translation:

  • Content inside <script> and <style> tags
  • HTML comments
  • Content inside elements excluded by your CSS selector configuration
  • URLs, email addresses, phone numbers
  • Pure numbers and numeric strings
  • Content on pages excluded in your project settings

No Configuration Required

All of the above happens automatically. You don’t need to add any special tags, attributes, or configuration to your pages. Universally detects and translates the appropriate elements based on the HTML structure of each page.

The only optional configurations that affect what gets translated are:

Glossary rules — to control how specific terms are handled (see Glossary Rules)

Include/Exclude CSS selectors — to target or skip specific page sections

Exclude pages — to skip entire pages from translation

Exclude link localization — to prevent specific links from being rewritten

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