If your website serves visitors from multiple countries, sending everyone to the same URL is leaving money on the table. Language-based redirects automatically route visitors to the right content based on their browser language.

How Language-Based Routing Works

Every browser sends an Accept-Language header with each request. This header contains the visitor's preferred languages, ordered by priority. For example:

Accept-Language: de-DE,de;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7

This tells us the visitor prefers German, then English. A language-based redirect reads this header and sends the visitor to the appropriate URL.

Use Cases

• International marketing campaigns — One link, multiple language destinations
• Product launches — Route to localized landing pages
• App store links — Send iOS users to the App Store, Android users to Google Play (combined with user-agent detection)
• E-commerce — Redirect to the correct country store
• Content localization — Serve blog posts in the reader's language

Setting Up Language Redirects in LinkVice

LinkVice makes language-based routing simple:

1. Create a redirect for your domain
2. Set the default target URL (fallback for unmatched languages)
3. Add language rules: select a language code and enter the destination URL

For example, a redirect for promo.example.com could route:

• German (de) → https://example.com/de/promo
• French (fr) → https://example.com/fr/promo
• Spanish (es) → https://example.com/es/promo
• Default → https://example.com/en/promo

Best Practices

• Always set a default fallback URL
• Use two-letter language codes (en, de, fr) not locale codes (en-US, de-DE)
• Test with browser language settings or curl: curl -H "Accept-Language: de" https://yoururl.com
• Monitor analytics to see which languages generate the most traffic

Start routing international traffic for free →