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Migrating from Polylang

Already using Polylang to run your site in several languages? LingoPress includes an assistant that brings all of that information over to LingoPress for you, without you having to redo anything by hand. Your content and its translations stay exactly as they were, now managed by LingoPress.

What gets brought over

  • Your site’s languages: their name, their language code, whether they’re written left to right or right to left (like Arabic or Hebrew), the order they appear in, and which one is your main language.
  • The language of each piece of content: your posts, your pages, and your categories and tags.
  • The links between translations: the connection that says “this post in Spanish is the same as that one in English,” both for your posts and for your categories and tags.

What doesn’t get brought over

  • Polylang’s internal settings (how it builds web addresses, its sync options, and so on). There’s no need: LingoPress has its own, and you set them up however you like.
  • The translations of individual interface texts that Polylang stores separately (for example, some menu or widget text).

How to run it

This step is done with a technical WordPress tool. If you’re not comfortable with this kind of task, your developer or your hosting provider can run it for you in a moment; you just need to pass them this instruction:

wp eval-file wp-content/plugins/lingopress/tests/import-polylang.php

You can run it as many times as you like without any worry: it won’t duplicate anything. Whatever has already been brought over is recognized and skipped. That way you can launch it, review how everything turned out, and launch it again if any content was left pending.

  1. Make a backup of your site. Your hosting provider usually offers this option with a single click.
  2. With Polylang still installed (active or not), activate LingoPress and run the assistant.
  3. Check that everything is right: look at your languages under LingoPress → Languages, check the language columns in your content lists, and browse your site the way your visitors would see it.
  4. Deactivate Polylang. Its data isn’t touched or deleted, so if something doesn’t feel right, you can go back without losing anything.
  5. Once you’ve confirmed that everything works, you can remove Polylang completely.

Tip: it’s best not to have both plugins active at the same time on your live site. They both try to control the languages at once and end up stepping on each other.