Content & exclusions

The Content tab under LocaleReady → Settings covers three related decisions: when translation runs, what counts as “the page” for translation purposes, and which parts of the site should not be translated at all.

When translation happens

• During the first request (on by default). A missing string is translated the first time a page is read in that language, then served from storage forever after.
• In the background when a post is saved. Off by default, because it spends translation credit the moment you hit Save rather than when a visitor actually asks for that language. Turn it on to keep a first visitor from ever waiting on a translation call.
• Pretranslate the whole site. A one-time scan, run from the Tools screen, that walks every page in every enabled language and translates what is missing. Useful right after enabling a new language, or after a large content import.

Beyond the page

Pages are always translated. Two more surfaces are covered separately, because neither one is a page render:

• Content loaded after the page renders — AJAX and REST responses, including WooCommerce’s Store API cart and checkout calls. Off by default: these endpoints carry a site’s machine traffic as well as its readable text, and only known, specific fields are ever translated, never a whole response guessed at.
• Outgoing email. The subject and body of a message WordPress sends — links included. Off by default, and deliberately narrow: addresses, headers, and attachments are never touched, because a translated Reply-To header is a bounced email.

Exclusion rules

A rule matches a path, a post type, or a taxonomy, with an operator (starts with, ends with, is exactly, contains, or a regular expression for a path) and an optional list of languages it applies to — leave every language unticked to apply it to all of them.

For each match, choose what a visitor gets:

• Redirect to the original page — sent back to the source-language address, and never shown the translated one.
• Show the page, untranslated — the page loads at its translated address, in your own language. Useful for a checkout flow or a legal page you never want machine-translated, without hiding it from that audience entirely.
• Return a 404 — the page answers as though it does not exist in that language, and is left out of the switcher, hreflang, and sitemaps.

Rules are evaluated top to bottom, and the first match wins — put a narrow exception above the broader rule it carves an exemption from. A page you have set to Custom or Disabled for a specific language in its own editor panel is more specific than any rule here, and keeps that setting regardless of what a rule below it says.