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Resolving Common TranslatePress Slug and Sitemap Issues with SEO Plugins

20 threads Sep 9, 2025 Plugin → Translate multilingual sites – translatepress

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Many WordPress users leveraging the 'Translate Multilingual sites – TranslatePress' plugin encounter challenges with URL slugs and sitemaps when integrating with popular SEO tools like RankMath, Yoast, or Squirrly. These issues can lead to 404 errors, incorrect indexing in search engines, and a frustrating user experience. This guide consolidates the most common problems and their community-vetted solutions, based on extensive discussion threads.

Common Problems and Their Root Causes

The interactions between translation, permalinks, and SEO plugins are complex. Here are the typical scenarios users face:

  • Translated Slugs Appearing with Revision Numbers (-2, -3): This often occurs when identical slugs are saved for multiple languages, causing WordPress's native duplicate-slug prevention to append numbers. This is a known issue that the TranslatePress team has addressed in recent plugin updates.
  • Custom Post Type or Taxonomy Slugs Being Translated Unwantedly: Plugins like WP Event Manager or custom taxonomies might have their base slugs (e.g., event to evento) translated automatically, leading to 404 errors if the new path isn't recognized.
  • Sitemaps Not Reflecting Translations or Including Deleted Languages: A frequent conflict is that the sitemap generated by an SEO plugin does not update to show translated slugs or may continue to list URLs for languages that have been removed from the TranslatePress configuration.
  • Canonical or hreflang URL Issues: The canonical URLs in your page's meta tags might point to the wrong language version. It's important to understand that TranslatePress itself does not set canonical tags; this is the responsibility of your SEO plugin.
  • Encoded URLs in Sitemaps: For languages using non-Latin characters (e.g., Russian, Arabic, Japanese), URLs may appear as encoded strings (e.g., %d1%82%d0%b8%d1%82%d0%b0%d0%bd) in the sitemap XML. This is standard URL encoding and does not negatively impact SEO or browser functionality.

Recommended Troubleshooting Steps

Before proceeding, ensure both TranslatePress and your SEO plugin are updated to their latest versions, as many fixes are regularly implemented.

  1. Review Your SEO Plugin's Compatibility Settings: Some SEO plugins, like RankMath, have specific settings for multilingual sites. Ensure that 'Translate Slugs' or similar features within your SEO plugin are configured correctly to work with TranslatePress.
  2. Check for Conflicting URL Rewrites: If you have used an SEO plugin to remove category bases (e.g., /product/), this can conflict with how TranslatePress generates translated URLs. The general recommendation is to avoid removing these bases, as support for this configuration is limited.
  3. Investigate Sitemap Generation: If your sitemap is missing translated URLs or contains outdated ones, the issue often lies in how the SEO plugin generates the sitemap. Some users have found success by switching to a different sitemap generator plugin that has better inherent support for multilingual alternate links (hreflang).
  4. Clear All Caches: After making any changes to your translation or SEO settings, clear your WordPress cache, any server-side cache, and your CDN's cache (if applicable).
  5. Re-save Permalinks: A simple but effective step is to visit Settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard and simply click 'Save Changes' without making any modifications. This refreshes the rewrite rules and can resolve many slug-related issues.

Understanding the Limits of the Free Version

It is crucial to understand that many advanced slug and sitemap functionalities are not part of the free version of TranslatePress. According to numerous support thread responses, the following features typically require a paid add-on:

  • Translating slugs for posts, pages, categories, and custom post types.
  • Generating or influencing multilingual sitemaps.
  • The SEO Pack addon, which is designed to improve integration with SEO plugins.

Discussions about these pro features are not permitted on the WordPress.org support forums. Users experiencing issues with these features are typically directed to contact the plugin's support team directly through their official website.

When to Seek Further Help

If the steps above do not resolve your issue, your specific case might require more advanced investigation. The next best step is to search for your exact error message on independent troubleshooting sites like BugWP.com or the official WordPress support forums for your SEO plugin, as the conflict may be more related to one specific plugin's behavior.

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