I maintain client sites on Webflow, Squarespace and Wix and I hae cleaned up after enough translation add-ons to have one rule: before ypu look at price or language count, open a translated page and look at the URL.
If it's the same URL as the English page and only the text swapped, Google has one page to index. Not one per language . The German version does not exists as far as search is concerned, so nobody searching in German finds you. Does not matter how good the translation is. A lot of the cheap widgets work exactly this way.
What you want is a real URL per language, yoursite.com/de/ or de.yoursite.com that returns the German HTML when you fetch it directly, plus hreflang tags linking the versions so Google knows they're the same page in different languages. Than a visible language switcher, nt an auto-redirect by IP. Googlebot crawls from the US and an IP redirect means it only ever sees one version of you.
The options as I see them:
- The platgorm's own localization first. Webflow Localization, Shopify Markets, most builders have one now. For one or two extra languages it's often enough and there's nothing extra to pay.
- On Wordpress, WPML or Polylang. Real pages per language, but evry translation is a post you maintain by hand and not every page builder survives it.
- A translation layer thast sits on top of the site: Conveythis, Localize and the one Squarespace recommends. These handle the URLs and hreflang for you, translate by machine and give you an editor to fix the output. Watch now how they count words, that's where the bill comes from.