Technical SEO Consultant, Spain

What translation plugins really publish

Most multilingual Spanish sites rely on a plugin or module for languages: WPML or Polylang on WordPress, a proxy-style service such as Weglot, or the built-in language features of PrestaShop and Shopify. They make adding Catalan or English easy, and they also decide, often silently, how URLs, canonicals, sitemaps and hreflang behave.

What I check in the published output, language by language:

• Fallbacks. Pages that exist only in Spanish but appear under /ca/ or /en/ with Spanish text, duplicating the original.
• Automatic alternates. Hreflang tags listing a translation for every page, including ones that were never translated.
• Slugs. Whether translated pages get translated slugs or keep the Spanish ones, and whether that was a deliberate choice.
• Rendering. Whether translated text is present in the HTML the server sends, or inserted later by a script, depending on how the service is configured.
• Sitemaps and properties. Whether each language appears in the sitemaps and has its own view in Search Console.

The quickest test is often the simplest: view the source of the same page in each language and compare titles, canonicals, alternates and body text. A crawl per language folder then shows how widespread each problem is. The full method is on my technical SEO audit page, and the principles on my technical SEO page.

ñ, accents and Catalan characters in URLs

Spanish slugs bring their own character questions. Accented vowels and the ñ can be kept, in which case browsers show them normally and servers transmit them percent-encoded, or they can be replaced with plain letters. Replacement is common, but it has a well-known trap: removing the tilde can change the meaning of a word entirely, as año and ano show. For a product or service slug, a careless conversion can make an address look odd or unprofessional when shared.

Catalan adds two more characters. The ç appears in many words, and the middle dot in l·l, as in col·legi or instal·lació, is handled inconsistently by slug generators: some drop it, some replace it with a hyphen, some keep it encoded. Galician uses the ñ as well, while Basque words create fewer accent issues but long compound terms.

Whichever rule you choose, what matters is consistency:

• The same form in the slug generator, sitemaps, canonicals, hreflang and internal links.
• Redirects from older variants, so links and bookmarks keep working.
• One case convention for percent-encoding, so a page is not reachable at two addresses.

I write a short URL style guide per language with your developers and test that the server returns one canonical form. Fonts are part of the same check: subsets that omit ñ, ç or the middle dot force the browser to borrow a fallback font for those letters, which looks careless and can shift the layout while loading.

Store filters, regional prices and product data

Spanish online stores share the usual faceted navigation risk: every combination of size, color, brand, price range and sort order creates a URL. I classify filter pages with you into those that match real searches and deserve a stable, indexable page, those that can stay crawlable but out of the index, and parameters that should not be crawled at all. The ecommerce SEO page covers the commercial reasoning.

Spain adds a regional layer. The Canary Islands sit outside the ordinary VAT system and use their own indirect tax, and Ceuta and Melilla have separate arrangements. Stores that show different prices or tax treatment for these customers sometimes do it through separate URLs, parameters or duplicated products. The goal is one clear page per product, with regional price handling done in a way that does not multiply indexable versions or confuse product markup. Tax handling itself should be confirmed with your advisor.

Product data also deserves a check at its source. Where the catalog comes from an ERP, the export determines titles, descriptions, variants and stock status. Typical issues include products arriving with empty descriptions, variants published as separate thin pages and withdrawn items left online with nothing on them. Fixing the export is often more effective than patching pages one by one, which is where my ERP consulting in Spain and the search work meet. Markup is then validated against visible content, following the approach on my schema markup consulting page.

Mobile speed, heavy themes and consent tools

Many Spanish small and mid-sized business sites run on multipurpose themes and page builders that load large amounts of code on every page, whether that page uses it or not. Add a slider, a WhatsApp button, a chat widget, review badges, a consent platform and several marketing tags, and the main content can arrive late on a phone, even on a good mobile connection.

The starting point is real-visitor performance data, grouped by template, to see which page types fail. Lab tests then isolate causes:

• Theme and builder code loaded on pages that do not need it.
• Uncompressed hero images and background videos.
• Third-party widgets that block the main thread.
• Fonts loaded from several sources with no preloading strategy.
• Tags released all at once after consent is given.

Consent tools deserve care. Spanish data protection guidance on cookies, together with GDPR, shapes how tags may load, and that design belongs to your legal advisor. Within it, there is often room to load scripts more efficiently, and I suggest changes your developers can test.

Sites built on JavaScript frameworks such as React, Vue or Next.js get an extra rendering check, comparing server output with the rendered page, as described on my JavaScript SEO page. The Core Web Vitals consulting page explains how performance work is prioritized.

Logs, Search Console and working with your developers

Good technical diagnosis combines several views of the site. I set up Search Console so each language folder can be reviewed separately, read the page indexing report for exclusion reasons, and request a sample of server logs from your hosting provider where possible. Logs reveal the addresses crawlers really fetch, which can differ from what the crawl suggests, especially on stores with filters or old URL patterns left over from earlier platforms.

Many Spanish sites are maintained by a small agency or a freelance developer rather than an in-house team. The deliverables are designed for that reality:

• An issue register grouped by root cause and template, not a list of thousands of URLs.
• Tickets describing the current behavior, the desired behavior and how to test it.
• A call to agree priorities, since some fixes are trivial on one platform and costly on another.
• Verification on staging and after release, with a checklist your developer can reuse.

Redesigns and platform changes need special care: every language folder, image and campaign URL in the redirect map, with a crawl of the old site saved beforehand for comparison; my SEO migration consulting page lists each step.

The work is remote. International structure and hreflang strategy are covered on my international SEO page for Spain, the broader search plan sits with my SEO consulting for Spain, and the Spain overview lists the ERP and growth work around it.