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Troubleshooting Common Polylang Language and Content Display Issues

24 threads Sep 16, 2025 Plugin → Polylang

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Polylang is a powerful tool for creating multilingual WordPress sites, but like any complex plugin, users can sometimes encounter unexpected behavior. Based on community reports, a frequent category of problems involves content displaying in the wrong language, not showing at all, or causing conflicts with other themes and plugins. This guide will help you diagnose and resolve some of the most common issues.

Common Symptoms and Their Likely Causes

Users often report problems that, while seemingly different, share a common root. Here are the typical symptoms:

  • Frontpage or posts page showing in the wrong language: Your translated homepage might display a blog archive instead of the correct static page.
  • Author pages redirecting to the homepage: The author archive page works in the default language but redirects to the homepage when viewed in a second language.
  • New posts automatically connecting to the wrong language: Despite your settings, new content is automatically assigned to a language you didn't intend.
  • Custom post type pages defaulting to the site's primary language: Pages for items like 'custom_item' always show menus and language codes in the default language, even when accessed from a translated page.
  • 404 errors after creating drafts: Creating an unpublished draft in a second language with the same slug can cause the original published post to return a 404 error.
  • Third-party plugin conflicts: Plugins for guest authors, galleries, or page builders may not handle multilingual data correctly, leading to authors, galleries, or shortcodes not working as expected in all languages.

Step-by-Step Troubleshooting Guide

Follow these steps to identify and fix the problem.

Step 1: Check Your Polylang Settings

First, rule out simple configuration errors. Navigate to Languages → Settings in your WordPress admin.

  • Default Language: Verify this is set correctly. This language acts as a fallback.
  • URL Modifications: Ensure your chosen URL structure is compatible with your theme and other plugins. For example, using 'The front page URL contains the language code' has been known to cause conflicts with certain plugins like AMP.
  • Custom Post Types & Taxonomies: Review which content types are set to be translated. If a third-party plugin (e.g., for guest authors) has forced its post type to be translated, the checkbox will be ticked and grayed out. This can cause authors to be duplicated per language.
  • Synchronization: Crucially, go to the Synchronization tab. If you are using custom fields and they are displaying the wrong text in the backend, ensure you have not accidentally activated synchronization for those specific metadatas. Synchronization copies data between translations, which is often not the desired behavior for field-level content.

Step 2: Conduct a Conflict Test

Many issues arise from conflicts with your theme or other plugins.

  1. Switch temporarily to a default WordPress theme like Twenty Twenty-One. Does the problem persist?
  2. Deactivate all plugins except Polylang. Check if the issue is resolved.
  3. If the problem is gone, reactivate your plugins one by one, checking after each activation, to identify the culprit. Common sources of conflict include caching plugins, SEO plugins, page builders, and specialized plugins like Molongui or PublishPress Authors.

Step 3: Investigate Caching

Caching is a very common cause of language display issues, especially on the frontend.

  • Clear All Caches: Clear any caching provided by your plugin, your host, and your browser.
  • Disable Caching Temporarily: To see if it's the root cause, disable your caching plugin entirely and see if the problem is resolved. If it is, you will need to configure your cache to respect language cookies or URLs.
  • Object Caching: As seen in one thread, Polylang uses its own object cache. In rare cases, custom code (e.g., using hooks like pre_option_page_on_front) can conflict with this. If you have advanced code, this is a potential area to investigate.

Step 4: Check Your .htaccess and Permalinks

Problems like 404 errors or incorrect redirects can often be fixed by refreshing your WordPress permalinks.

  1. Go to Settings → Permalinks.
  2. Simply click 'Save Changes' without making any modifications. This refreshes the rewrite rules and can resolve many routing issues.

Step 5: Review Custom Code and Slug Usage

  • Duplicate Slugs: In the free version of Polylang, each translation of a post must have a unique slug. If you save a draft in a second language using the same slug as a published post, it can cause a URL conflict and 404 errors. Always use unique slugs for each language.
  • Custom Code: If you have code that dynamically creates pages (e.g., for a custom post type), it must be integrated with Polylang's language functions. The page generation logic needs to detect the current language and use functions like pll_get_post() to fetch the correct translation of an ID.

When to Seek Further Help

If these steps do not resolve your issue, the problem may be highly specific to your setup. When seeking help in community forums, be prepared to provide:

  • The exact nature of the problem.
  • A list of your active plugins and your theme.
  • Your Polylang settings (e.g., URL structure, synchronized fields).
  • The URL of a page where the error occurs.

By methodically working through these common areas, you can diagnose and fix most language and content display issues in Polylang.

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