Locale-Specific Pages & Sections

Webflow does not have a built-in way to create locale-specific page or sections.

For example let's suppose your primary locale is English, and you have Dutch as a secondary locale. What if you want a page that only exists in the Dutch locale? Or only in the English locale?

The Problem

The problem is more complex than you think, because it involves

• Your sitemap
• Your href lang links in the translated page set

It also raises some ambiguities;

• How does navigation work, and how do you handle the distinctions for each locale?
• What happens if you're on that Dutch only page and then change the locale switcher to English?

Possible Solutions

Our preferred approach is to keep it simple. We let the pages overlap 100% but we customize irrelevant pages depending on what the client needs.

Soft 404 - This Page Does not Exist

One approach is to take your non-existant page and return an error message, plus an explanation like "this page only exists in Dutch, click here to view it."

Redirect

Or you can simply redirect. This can make sense if there is only one possible answer to the page they've requested.

The downside to this is that users who somehow arrive at that page will be locale-switched to the target language.

Handling Custom Displays

The basic mechanic here is to use custom CSS and the _:lang() pseudoselector to manage what is displayed for each language.

Let's say you have a large page where the body content only makes sense in Dutch. You can decide to hide that entire section of the page by assigning a class of _en-hide with custom CSS like;

_{.en-hide:lang(en) { display: none; }}

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