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Coming from Polylang

If your site already uses Polylang, LingoPress can bring over your languages and your translations with one click. Your posts don’t change: they’re simply managed by LingoPress from then on.

You need LingoPress 1.1.1 or later.

What comes over and what doesn’t

Section titled “What comes over and what doesn’t”

It brings over:

  • Your languages, with their name, their order and which one is your main language.
  • The language of each post, page, category and tag.
  • Which posts, pages, categories and tags are translations of each other.

It doesn’t bring over (you set it up again in LingoPress):

  • Your language switcher. Polylang’s stops working when you deactivate it: add LingoPress’s as explained in Language switcher and menus.
  • Which menu goes with each language. See A menu for each language.
  • The short texts you translated in Polylang’s string translations.
  • Polylang’s settings. LingoPress has its own, and most work without you touching anything.

Step by step

Section titled “Step by step”
  1. Make a backup of your site. Your hosting provider usually offers this with one click.
  2. Deactivate Polylang in Plugins, but don’t delete it yet. Its information stays on your site, and LingoPress needs it to bring it over. It’s best not to have both plugins active at the same time: they both try to control the languages.
  3. Install and activate LingoPress (see First steps).
  4. Go to LingoPress → Getting started. LingoPress finds Polylang’s information and shows the Coming from Polylang? box. Click Import from Polylang.
  5. When it’s done, a message tells you how many languages, posts, categories and tags, and translations were brought over.
  6. Check that everything is right: look at your languages in LingoPress → Languages, check the language columns in your post lists, and browse your site the way your visitors would.
  7. Add the language switcher and, if you use them, assign the menus for each language.
  8. When everything works, you can delete Polylang.

Your web addresses

Section titled “Your web addresses”

LingoPress puts the language in all your web addresses, including your main language’s (for example, /es/my-post/). If Polylang didn’t do that, some addresses change. You don’t lose visitors: the old addresses of your posts and pages take people to the new ones.

Can I import again?

Section titled “Can I import again?”

Yes, as many times as you want, without duplicating anything: whatever was already brought over is skipped, and if you changed your main language in LingoPress, it’s kept. Polylang’s information isn’t changed.

After the first import, the box moves to the end of Getting started, shows the date of the last import and offers an Import again button. It’s useful if you kept editing in Polylang in the meantime.