Track your visitors' browser language

Plausible doesn't record the browser language by default. The location reports show where your visitors are, but in countries with several languages, such as Switzerland, Belgium or Canada, that doesn't tell you which language they prefer. You can add the browser language yourself with a custom property, then filter and compare your stats by it.

BusinessCustom properties is a Business plan feature.Compare plans →

1. Add the language to your tracking snippet

In your Plausible snippet, add a customProperties option to the plausible.init call:

plausible.init({
  // ... Other initialization options
  customProperties: {
    language: (navigator.language || "unknown").split("-")[0]
  }
})

This sends the visitor's main browser language as a two-letter code, such as en, de or fr, with every pageview and every custom event.

If you'd rather keep the regional variant, such as de-CH or fr-CA, leave out .split("-")[0]:

plausible.init({
  // ... Other initialization options
  customProperties: {
    language: navigator.language || "unknown"
  }
})

The two-letter code keeps the report short. The full code is useful when regional variants matter to you, for example Swiss German versus German.

If you use our NPM package, pass the same customProperties option to init.

2. Add the property in your site settings

Go to your site settings, open the Custom Properties section and add language. You can also add it with one click once the first pageviews with it have come in.

3. See your stats by language

At the bottom of your dashboard, in the Goals section, open the Properties tab and choose language. You see your visitors, pageviews and conversions for each language.

Click a language to filter the whole dashboard by it, for example to see the top pages or sources for visitors whose browser is set to French. Because the property is sent with your custom events too, you can also see how each language converts on your goals. More on filtering by custom properties.

Browser language or page language

The browser language is the language your visitors have set in their browser, so it shows what they prefer. If your site is available in several languages and you'd like to see which version they're reading instead, send the language of the page:

plausible.init({
  // ... Other initialization options
  customProperties: {
    page_language: document.documentElement.lang || "unknown"
  }
})

This reads the lang attribute of your page's <html> tag, so it only works when your site sets one. You can send both properties side by side to compare what visitors prefer with what they read.