Building a Multilingual Website with Hebrew (RTL): What to Plan From Day One

Translation is the easy part

For companies in Israel, a site in Hebrew, English and often Russian is normal. The texts can be translated in a week. What takes planning is everything around them: how search engines find each version, how users switch languages, and how a layout designed left-to-right behaves when it has to read right-to-left.

One URL per language

Give every language its own address — for example /en/, /ru/ and /he/. Search engines index URLs, not cookies or browser settings, so a version that only appears after a script switches the language may never show up in search.

• Connect the versions with hreflang tags; each page should list all its language versions, including itself
• Add an x-default version for visitors whose language you don't support
• Translate titles, meta descriptions and, where it makes sense, slugs

Suggest, don't force

Google's guidance for multilingual sites recommends against automatically redirecting users based on their perceived language. A tourist in Tel Aviv may want English; a Russian speaker in Haifa may share a link with a Hebrew-speaking colleague. Show a clear language switcher, remember the visitor's choice, and offer — not impose — a suggestion.

RTL is a mirror, not a translation

Setting dir="rtl" and lang="he" on the page flips text direction, but your CSS must cooperate. Use logical properties — margin-inline-start instead of margin-left, padding-inline-end instead of padding-right — and the same stylesheet works in both directions.

• Mirror navigation, arrows, progress indicators and sliders
• Don't mirror logos, photos, media player controls, or phone numbers and prices
• Mixed text — English brand names or numbers inside Hebrew sentences — needs testing; the bdi element helps isolate it
• Forms: email and URL fields should stay left-to-right even on the Hebrew page

Plan the content workflow

Languages fall out of sync when updating one is easy and the others are an afterthought. Choose a CMS or admin panel where every text has fields for all languages side by side, and decide who approves each translation. Machine translation is a good draft, but marketing copy in Hebrew should be checked by a native speaker.

Test with real users

Before launch, ask a native speaker of each language to go through the main scenarios on a phone. Problems in RTL are visual and obvious to a native reader — and almost invisible to a developer who doesn't read Hebrew.

Two related reads: choosing fonts that work in Latin, Cyrillic and Hebrew, and the IS 5568 accessibility requirements every Israeli site has to meet. Separate URLs and hreflang are also the base of multilingual SEO, and we build multi-page websites in all three languages.

Planning a site in Hebrew, English and Russian? Codearia builds multilingual sites with full RTL support — tell us about your project.