Serving 78 cards x 5 languages from one codebase: our i18n routing

is a React SPA, Googlebot needs to execute JavaScript to see the content. We confirmed through the URL Inspection tool that rendering works, but it does add latency to indexing. If we were starting fresh, we'd probably use SSR or at minimum pre-render the card detail pages.

The takeaway

Running a multilingual site from a single codebase is doable if you commit to a few principles early: language-in-path routing, generated (not hand-maintained) sitemaps, bidirectional hreflang, and self-referencing canonicals. For as single-codebase SPAs, and the pattern has held up across projects with very different content shapes. The i18n tax is real, but it's a solvable problem once you get the routing and SEO plumbing right from day one.