Hreflang is an HTML attribute (and an XML sitemap annotation) that tells Google which URL on your site is the correct version for a given language and region. Without hreflang, Google often guesses wrong — showing your French-speaking visitors the English version of your blog post, or indexing only one language out of five.
For any WordPress site targeting more than one country, hreflang is not optional. And because of how WordPress handles URLs, getting it right by hand is painful: you have to maintain a consistent set of reciprocal tags across every translated page, update them every time you add a language, and keep them in sync with your sitemap.
Lang Forge does all of that automatically, for every post, in both the HTML <head> and your XML sitemap.
For every post, page, or custom post type that has a translation, Lang Forge injects a complete set of <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags into the HTML head:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/blog-post/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/blog-post/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/blog-post/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/es/blog-post/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/blog-post/" />Reciprocal tagging is handled automatically — every translated version of the page knows about every other translation.
Lang Forge ships a dedicated sitemap at /sitemap-hreflang.xml that lists every post in every language, with full <xhtml:link> annotations per entry. Google Search Console accepts this format directly and uses it to understand your site’s multilingual structure.
If you’re using WordPress 5.5+ with the built-in sitemap (/wp-sitemap.xml), Lang Forge injects hreflang data into it without a separate URL. Whichever sitemap you submit to Google, the translations are included.
If you’re already using Yoast SEO, Rank Math, AIOSEO, or SEOPress with their own sitemaps, Lang Forge hooks into those as well and ensures hreflang data is present in the sitemap your SEO plugin generates.
You don’t do anything. The next request to the page includes the new hreflang tags. The next sitemap regeneration includes the new entry. Google finds it on its next crawl.
There’s no “regenerate sitemap” button. No “update hreflang” action. It’s wired into the normal WordPress publish and update lifecycle.
After you activate Lang Forge and translate your first post:
hreflang — you should see a complete set of tags for every language version/sitemap-hreflang.xml directly and confirm every translated post appearsSearch Console’s International Targeting report will start showing hreflang data within a few days of indexing.
If you’ve chosen the parameter URL format (?lang=de), hreflang tags still work correctly. Lang Forge generates absolute URLs with the correct query parameter and Google treats each parameterized URL as a distinct page.
Get Lang Forge — from $54/year →
Automatic hreflang tags and multilingual XML sitemaps are included in every paid plan — and in the free version on WordPress.org.
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