Bilingual site support and product data for an industrial manufacturer

The client is a German industrial manufacturer that sells to other businesses. Its bilingual WordPress site was built by another agency on WPBakery.

A German web agency brought me the site’s tasks from 2023 to 2025, and I did them on my own: new sections, forms, ongoing fixes and a data model for the product catalogue. Every change went out in German and English.

Projects

1. 2023–2025

   WordPress support and new features on a bilingual site

   I kept developing the bilingual WordPress site: a careers section, contact forms on product pages, security clean-up and fixes in both languages.

   I built the careers section on a job listings plugin, styled it to the site and checked it from 320 to 1920 px. Then I created real job ads on the live site, and new ads are posted by duplicating an existing one.

   On all published product pages, German and English, I replaced the bare email links with a contact form. A small script rewrites every remaining email link in the browser. I moved the admin login to its own address and removed a plugin nobody maintained anymore.

   I also added a newsletter form to the footer, fixed text that overlapped on phones and put in the updated logo. A careers block stopped reacting, and I traced it to an invisible layer swallowing the clicks. Guests and editors saw different job lists, and that came from private ads and the cache.

   For speed, I tested the options on a private copy and left the live site alone. Then I told the agency plainly what caching and lighter images would give, and what mobile would need beyond that.

   The job listings, the product page form, the email script and the new logo are live on the site.

   Stack: WordPress, WPBakery, WPML, PHP, JavaScript

2. 2024

   Product technical data and Schema.org markup

   I built a technical data model for the product catalogue in both languages. One source feeds the product pages, the category lists and the Schema.org Product markup.

   Instead of a plugin licence for a single repeater field, I wrote a repeatable technical-data field for the product editor. The same data goes to the product page, to category lists through a shortcode, and to Schema.org Product markup with each spec as a property.

   The separate spec tables, some of them images, needed one place to edit them. I made a prototype for that and handed it to the agency to decide. In the same release I fixed English category links that led back to the German pages.

   On the dev copy a category page went from 2 schema items to 9 products. The categories went live in German and English in October 2024, and their pages carry Product markup with each product’s technical properties.

   Stack: WordPress, WPML, PHP, Schema.org